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MODERN CHRISTIANITY, 



A CIVILIZED HEATHENISM. 



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48 65 55 

AUG 1 2 1942 



PEEFAOE. 



The question which is beginning to agitate the religious 
world is not whether we shall continue to recite damna- 
tory clauses in our Athanasian Creed, but whether there 
is any creed whatever that is worth reciting ; not whether 
this form of Christianity is preferable to that, but whether 
all forms of Christianity pretending to come from God 
through Christ are not gross impositions from beginning 
to end. No man who reads a newspaper, or listens to a 
conversation in his common room or at his club, will con- 
sent to place the impending controversy on any narrower 
basis. Revealed religion is on its trial before the world, 
not for some trifling blemishes which a little mild correc- 
tion may mend, but for its very life ; and if the clergy, 
its natural defenders, can show no intelligible reason why 
it should stand, common-sense, in this country at least, 
will very speedily decide upon its merits, after a somewhat 
rough-and-ready fashion. 

Christianity is one of two things ; and the whole matter 
before us resolves itself into the question, which of these 
two things it is. It is a human philosophy, founded by a 
great moral teacher called Christ, who was so much better 
than Epicurus or Zeno, inasmuch as he hit upon a system 
which was better adapted for civilizing the world, and 
taught precepts nobler, purer, more disinterested, more 

3 



4 Preface. 

unselfish, than the precepts of any other school : or it 
is a distinct revelation of God's will, brought down from 
heaven by Christ the only-begotten Son ; claiming not 
to improve upon human philosophies, but to supersede 
them, to upset them, to annihilate them ; establishing 
in their stead a kingdom mysterious, supernatural, un- 
earthly, opposed in every sense to the traditions of this 
lower world. Christianity is one of these two things ; but 
it cannot be both of them together. If it be a very ex- 
cellent philosophy, it is not essentially divine, because 
man could have found out such a philosophy for himself ; 
unless, indeed, you are content to accept God merely as 
the indefinite source of every upright principle in the 
human mind. But, if it be essentially divine, it is not a 
very excellent philosoplry, because it forces man into the 
highly unphilosophic attitude of holding all things around 
him in utter contempt, in order that he may win a heaven 
so thoroughly opposed to earth, that the one has to be 
finally burnt up before the other can be opened. It is not 
a very excellent philosophy, because it threatens man with 
a hell whose tortures are so unspeakably horrible, that, 
unless you suppose his nature to be so far changed as to 
make him regard pain as a pleasurable sensation, every 
muscle of his hand and foot must be paralyzed with fear 
whenever he contemplates his possible doom. It is not a 
very excellent philosophy, because it demands the con- 
stant imitation, in every word and deed, of a Christ who 
never opened his mouth without furiously enraging all the 
philosophers of the day ; and who made himself either a 
laughing-stock, or an object of absolute detestation, to 
every creature with whom he came in contact, excepting 
those for whose benefit he was working miracles, or per- 
forming acts of superhuman love, — acts as contrary to 



Preface. 5 

every philosophic principle as light is contrary to dark- 
ness. It is not a very excellent philosophy, because, in 
the Catholic Church at least, it prescribes a form of wor- 
ship which either* involves the most absurd superstition 
that ever amused the philosophic mind, or commits the 
faithful worshipper to an enthusiasm of devotion so in- 
tense, to a penitence so abject, to vows of amendment so 
solemn, that his whole life, if he pretends to live out his 
pra} T ers, must needs be passed in the defiance of every 
philosophic theoiy, and in the atmosphere of another 
world. Clearly enough, if Christianity is the best means 
of civilizing mankind, it did not come from God ; and, if 
it came from God through Christ, it is of all the methods 
most unlikely to promote the civilization of mankind. 

Now, the * weak point about our present system of 
religion, the origin of all those doubts and difficulties 
and contradictions and uncertainties, which tend to uni- 
versal unbelief as surely as cause produces effect, 
appears to me to be just precisely this, that whereas 
Christianity must either be a human philosophy, designed 
to make this earth a pleasanter place to live in, or else a 
message from God, bidding men make this earth as un- 
pleasant to themselves as possible, so as to secure here- 
after the joys of heaven, — our 'weak point appears to be, 
that, whereas Christianity can only be one of these two 
things, we modern Christians have made up our minds 
that Christianity shall be to us both the one thing and the 
other. And we shall never heal our divisions and distrac- 
tions, or gain any real influence over the world, or cease 
to provoke the contemptuous smile, or to enjoy the well- 
bred forbearance, of reasonable men, until our archbishops 
and bishops, or our two houses of convocation, or what- 
ever other voice may be supposed to ha' e authority among 
1* 



6 Preface. 

us, shall plainly declare which of these two things Chris- 
tianity is. If it be only a human philosophy, then we 
shall know what we are about. A national religion is a 
very wholesome thing. People have always set up some 
sort of superstition ; and Christianity is probably a better 
kind of superstition than any other. All religions, too, 
have had their heroic ages and their myths, their ritual 
and their ceremonial, their promises and their threats ; 
and there can be no reason why our modern religion should 
be denied its rightful share. But if Christianity be what 
it pretends to be, the divinely-appointed channel for sav- 
ing, throughout all eternity, the souls of men, then we 
are instantly brought face to face with four tremendous 
facts, any one of which is sufficient by itself to deter- 
mine, with unhesitating exactness, what our mode of life 
must be. These facts are, (1) the duty of imitating 
Christ, (2) the prayer-book standard of devotion, (3) 
the difficulty of gaining heaven, (4) the everlasting 
flames of hell ; and, until we consent to alter the docu- 
ments wherein these four facts stand inscribed, we cannot 
escape their logical consequences, theorize as we may. 

We have to imitate Christ ; and there cannot exist two 
opinions as to the sort of life which he is represented to 
have led. The one characteristic feature of his conduct 
— the one point which separated him from the philoso- 
phers who had gone before, and made him distinctively 
Christ — was his opposition to the world. It was not 
merely that he preached an unpopular austerity. This 
had been done before ; and the openly vicious and luxuri- 
ous had relished such preaching as little from the lips of 
Socrates as from the lips of Christ. The point at which 
philosophy stopped short (because it was of earth) , and 
Christ began (because he was from heaven) , was in the 






Preface. 7 

attack not on vice, but on virtue. He taught that the 
righteousness of men, not their wickedness, was as filthy 
rags ; that the sternest type of morality was worthless 
before God, unless sanctified by faith, and beautified by 
graces sought of him in prayer. He taught the submis- 
sion of the entire heart and conscience to his Spirit, as 
to a personal, ever-present guide, without whose co-opera- 
tion deeds might be fair and motives honorable, but the 
inner life would yet be lived at enmity with God. He 
taught thus ; and so men hated him, not as they hated 
the philosopher, w r ho had quarrelled with their sensual, 
grovelling pleasures, but as they could only hate One who 
threw their \evy goodness in their teeth, and convicted 
them of blindness in the very things wherein the}^ thought 
their vision was so clear. And so they hated him ; and 
if there is one syllable of truth in the Bible, from Genesis 
to the Revelation, this truth stands out as the leading 
text of every page, — that, for the selfsame reason for 
which these men hated Christ, their fathers had hated 
God ever since his prophets first revealed him, and their 
sons would go on hating him till the end of time ; would 
hate him as they hate him even now, because he interferes 
not with the passions which they know already to be bad 
and evil, but with the standard it has pleased them to set 
up of the lawful and the good. A man does not need any 
Christ to tell him when he has debased himself to the level 
of the beast. His country punishes him for open notorious 
crime ; his very excesses are themselves the avengers of 
his- darling sin; and society has, for the most part, a 
sterner sentence to pass upon special forms of guilt than 
either conscience or penal code. It is the office of Christ 
— the one precise office which makes him Christ, and 
divides him from all the moralists that ever went before 



8 Preface. 

him — to convict the respectable, upright, good-natured, 
courteous gentleman, from the first beginning of Christian 
centuries in Jerusalem down to the last century that shall 
ever be ; to convict such a man of idolatry and stub- 
bornness of heart, because he is being daily conformed to, 
this world, instead of being transformed into the likeness 
of God. If Christ is any thing better than a human 
teacher of self-consistent truths, it is at this point that 
his business with men begins. For this they hate him ; 
and, as they hate him, so has he declared that they will 
hate all those w T ho belong to him. Until the w^orld is 
wholly converted, which nobody yet pretends, his people 
must ever wage with it a deadly war. There can be no 
peace between two such armies as the soldiers of Christ 
and the servants of the Devil. His disciples must fight 
as their Captain fought, making themselves an offence, a 
nuisance, an abhorrence, to every man who is not, like 
them, an open confessor of his name. This is the one 
test, the only test, by w T hich our Christian faithfulness is 
to be tried. Any Irypocrite can prate about his faith and 
his feelings. The Christian is to take up a manful posi- 
tion at the point where he stands most in need of all his 
strength and courage : and there, openly before client 
and friend and patron, there, just where the struggle is 
hardest, is to suffer and dare. Here is the one proof of 
true membership with Christ ; for in this world, at least, 
we can give no other. I refrain, however strongly tempt- 
ed, from quoting texts, — partly because a string of 
quotations makes a very unreadable book ; partly because 
I should never know where to stop, for the whole New 
Testament might be cited ; partly because I am unwilling 
to mix up with writings which may probably be misunder- 
stood any words or allusions which all men cherish as 



Preface. 9 

sacred. But I challenge the reader of any Gospel or 
Epistle in the Scriptures to produce one single page which 
does not more or less distinctly set forth the truth, that to 
be hated and persecuted and ridiculed from morning till 
night, by all the wprld, is in all ages, ancient and modern 
alike, the eternal, immutable, unfailing test of the Chris- 
tianity that comes from Christ. Hold any theory you 
please about the extent to which he went into society, and 
say, if 3'ou dare, that he dined with publicans and sinners 
because he liked their compan}^, and relished their good 
cheer, and the fact will jet remain, that his life was one 
incessant declaration of war, — not against the grosser 
forms of secret or open sin ; for to these, on the other 
hand, he was ever most merciful, — but against the com- 
mon-sense of the clever man of the world, and the god- 
lessness of public opinion. Make what allowance you 
please for weaknesses of the flesh, and unavoidable incon- 
sistencies, on the part of those who would copy an ex- 
ample so far above their reach, }'ou cannot possibly deny 
that Christ has made his life the exact pattern of our life, 
— a pattern not to be looked at from a distance with calm 
approval, but to be imitated with painful efforts which 
must never tire, — a pattern which we can only follow so 
long as our attitude is one of vigorous assault on every 
evil thing we see before us, — a pattern which we have 
infallibly declined, if we are so much as on speaking terms 
with the enemies of our Lord. If Christ's example be 
any thing to us at all, we Christians have no business 
even to stand willingly in the presence of an ungodly man, 
unless we are feeding him, or converting him, or doing 
him some bodiry or spiritual good. 

The plain truth is, that our Christian beliefs are im- 
measurably too big for any standard of Christian practice 



io Preface. 

which common- sense permits us to follow ; and when we 
find ourselves in this dilemma, instead of confessing that 
we have made some terrible mistake, and that our beliefs 
are either all wrong, or our actions indefensible, we are 
dishonest enough to argue backwards, to make up our 
minds what sort of life it will be sensible and sociable 
and convenient to lead, and then to pretend that our 
beliefs were meant to be qualified in order to agree with 
our predetermined line of conduct. We admit, for in- 
stance, that it is our duty to imitate Christ, and that the 
one characteristic feature of his life was his state of 
incessant enmity against the world. We find it incon- 
venient, however, thus to proclaim our religion wherever 
we go, to be marked men in every circle wherein we move, 
to expose ourselves to hatred, persecution, and ridicule, 
whenever we come in contact with our neighbors ; and so 
we calmly assume that times are changed, and that 
whereas it was, no doubt, the Christian's duty in the earlier 
centuries of the faith to fight manfully in his Master's 
name, and openly to publish his belief, at the risk even of 
bonds and martyrdom, it has become the Christian's duty, 
in these later days, to avoid every kind of singularity, to 
do very much as others do, and by all means to keep his 
religion smuggled up in his own heart, lest the wicked 
world should laugh at him. In short, finding that Chris- 
tianity is opposed to common-sense (which Christ, if he 
was Christ at all, must expressly have intended it to be), 
and being forced to make definite choice between the one 
principle and the other, we accept common-sense — the 
philosophy of civilized heathenism — as the guide of our 
daily life, and keep Christianity for our acts of devotion, 
for periods of solemnity or sentiment, and for times when 
we think we are going to die. This is somewhere about 



Preface. . 1 1 

what the modern Christian's imitation of Christ is worth ; 
and I ask any honest man to say whether such a contradic- 
tion between faith and practice is, or is not, a barefaced, 
transparent absurdity. 

No less apparent must it be that the second of our four 
great facts — the prayer-book standard of devotion — is 
utterly incompatible with any other life than the literal 
painful struggling imitation of Christ, action for action, 
word for word. Here, again, I forbear to quote ; but 
every psalm and every collect supports my view. If the 
strong crying wherewith we seek to move our God to pity, 
if the grateful thanks we render him for his abundant 
love, if either pra}^ers or praises in church on Sunday, 
have any sense at all, they positively forbid our spending 
the week in nioney-niaking, or worldly pleasure, or any 
other work than that of anxious preparation for judgment, 
and acts of mercy towards Christ's poor. And if it be 
thought that even yet there is room for cavilling, that my 
argument proves too much, *and that the example of 
Christ is absurdly be}'ond our efforts, and the prayer-book 
standard of devotion obviously intended to set us aiming 
at a great deal, in the hope that we may reach, at any rate, 
a very little ; if this be urged, then what shall we say of 
the other two tremendous facts, — of heaven and hell? 
Are they, also, to be "qualified," or explained away? 
Grant, if you please, that Christ's example was meant 
only to be admired, and that our psalms and litanies 
have no loftier practical design than to put us periodically 
into a devotional frame of mind. How are you going to 
deal with the very substantial truth (if it be a truth at 
all) that forever and forever each one of us is to dwell 
amid the inconceivable delights of heaven, or the appall- 
ing agonies of hell ? Have these familiar pictures, too, been 



1 2 Preface. 

over-colored by our spiritual guides, to serve the very im- 
moral purpose of tempting us into morality by telling us 
lies? Or if they be really truths, and such truths as to 
place every thing but themselves absolutely out of sight, 
what can any reasonable man among* us care to do, when 
he has provided food and clothing just sufficient to keep 
his own family alive, but spend the entire residue of his 
worldly goods in ministering to the poor and sorrowing, 
and the entire residue of his time in praising Christ his 
Saviour for the blessed hope of heaven, or in tearful sup- 
plication for deliverance from the terrors of hell ? If it were 
not a question of obvious duty, the common instinct of 
self-preservation would be enough to decide the matter. 
No man with one grain of sense, if he soberly believed 
that he was to live upon this earth for threescore years 
and ten, and then to live in heaven or hell for threescore 
million centuries ten times told, would consent to spend 
one short minute of his life in any work which did not 
tangibly and obviously tend to make his salvation more 
secure. If this should be denied, and it should be urged 
that the mind of man is constituted with a view to present 
action, and is incapable of brooding over possible futu- 
rities, I would ask, Who constituted it thus? Has Gocl, 
who is represented as all-merciful, and as longing to save 
our souls, has he threatened us with everlasting torment, 
if we do not obey his will, and at the same time so 
created us as to make it impossible for us to be very 
much afraid of his judgments ? Has he said to us poor, 
miserable creatures, "I shall damn you to all eternit}% 
if you do not consecrate your whole life and being to 
my service ; but if you dare to be overwhelmed with ter- 
ror at such a thought, and to go about weeping, and 
wringing your hands, and crying to me for salvation, I 



Preface. 1 3 

shall say that you are neglecting your worldly duties, and 
shall damn you all the more " ? This, if }^ou come to look 
the matter fairly in the face, is what the modern Christian 
tries to make himself believe that God has said, when he 
pretends that God has threatened him with eternal flames, 
and yet has enjoined upon him the duty of being merry 
and glad. Only on the supposition that the Christian's 
life is to be a facsimile of Christ's, and that he who does 
not follow him painfully step by step is crucifying him 
over again ; only thus is it possible for an intelligent being 
to believe that any man can deserve to be forever burnt 
alive. If it be true that the human mind cannot realize 
the horrors that await the impenitent, such a constitution 
was never ordained by a merciful God, but by a crafty 
Devil. It can only be a device to lull the perishing mil- 
lions into false security. And, if so, the very existence 
of such a device strengthens my argument a hundred-fold. 
For what are the clergy doing ? What are the benevolent 
religious lahty doing? What are our Christian women 
doing? They stand before God, responsible, each one 
according to his gifts, for the salvation of a world which 
neither loves nor fears him. The}' believe not only that 
the enormous majority of themselves and others will be 
burnt alive forever, unless the uncovenantecl mercy of 
God steps in specially to save them, but also that the 
Devil has been so subtle as almost to cut off man's last 
chance of safety, by preventing him from realizing that 
being burnt alive is a very dreadful thing. And yet, with 
this responsibility and this belief, the} 7 laugh and sing, 
and dance and play, and make merry after every conceiv- 
able fashion which their tastes suggest, and their means 
afford. Christian women drive and dress ; and Christian 
men hunt and dine ; and Christian children, who may die 



14 Preface. 

to-morrow, are told to enjoy themselves while they can ; 
and Christian priests and Christian bishops join the happy 
throng, and say that it is all right and proper, and laugh 
with the loudest, and joke with the funniest, and would 
think it the very worst possible taste, if some wicked un- 
believer were humbly to suggest a doubt whether any 
gentleman or lady present had one single thought in com- 
mon with the persecuted, despised, and sorrowing Christ. 
This is what orthodox Christians do. And when the simple- 
minded Briton wonders much within himself how they can 
reconcile such lives with damnatory clauses, and the abject 
poverty of Christ, and dares to ask some wise philosopher 
among them to explain, the wise philosopher falls upon 
him straightway , and crushes him then and there, and tells 
him that he is an infidel, and an atheist, and a free- 
thinker, and a sceptic, and laughs to scorn his ignorance 
in presuming to suppose, that because Christ was poor, and 
bade his followers be like him, there is any thing in the 
world to prevent a Christian bishop from taking rank 
among dukes and earls, and enjoying an income of fifteen 
thousand pounds a year ; or that the fact that each one of 
ns stands in peril of torments that shall never cease is 
any reason whatever why we should not thoroughly enjoy 
ourselves until the day of torment comes. 

The few weeks lately passed have witnessed a spectacle 
sufficiently instructive, in the judgment of an ordinarily 
constituted mind, to fix the value of ecclesiastical anath- 
emas forever. The flower — perhaps, rather, the ripe 
fruit — of our English clerg} r , the richest, luckiest, and 
portliest of our country rectors, as well as the most 
dignified ornaments of our cathedral stalls, have jour- 
neyed pleasantly up to town to discuss with wonted 
clerical vigor, and something less than clerical concern, 



Preface. 1 5 

whether or no it is to be " believed faithfully" that a vast 
majority of God's creatures will be tortured in everlast- 
ing flames. How these gentlemen occupied themselves, 
when released each day from the excitement of debate, we 
are not informed ; but those who know the clergy best 
are best aware that there are less agreeable ways of 
spending the inside of a week than accompanying a 
clerical friend to London, and that such visits, for the 
most part, are by no means to be accurately described as 
painful pilgrimages to a shrine. We do know, however, 
to what extent the members of convocation maintained 
their impressive composure during the debate itself ; and 
we never read that any canon or archdeacon, however 
warm he may have waxed on his own account in sparring 
with his reverend brother, so far forgot the manners of a 
polished gentleman as to break down utterly, out of 
simple kindliness of heart, while he professed his awful 
belief that millions upon millions of his fellow-country- 
men would be eternally burnt alive. With what appetite 
our dignitaries attacked their dinner in the evening, and 
what their dinner cost, and how peacefully they slept at 
night, are questions far too practical to be orthodox, — 
questions, indeed, which none but a flippant infidel would 
have the bad taste to raise. It shall be left for other 
than flippant infidels to answer, at their leisure, a question 
yet more practical, and say how beings fashioned out of 
common flesh and blood, with human sympathies and 
human ties, with wives and daughters to make their fire- 
sides bright at home, and happy boys leading happy 
romping lives, and running every conceivable mad-Eng- 
lish risk at school, can talk the theology of the orthodox 
Anglican divine, and ever care to eat or drink, or fall 
willingly asleep again. 






1 6 Preface. 

That Christian^, as the professed religion of English 
men and women, will survive the scrutinies of the next 
fifty or eight} 7 years, is more than I may dare to say. 
But this much I will say, that, if it does survive, it will 
survive on the principles which I have tried to sketch out, 
at the close of the following little dialogue, and on no 
other principles whatever. Its present position before the 
world is hopelessly untenable, and would not be tolerated 
for a single day, did it not manifestly suit the world's 
purpose to extend its gracious forbearance yet a little 
longer towards so valuable an ally. Nay, as I have been 
taunted with unfaithfulness for daring to submit that 
solemn beliefs ought to be either acted out, or else abjured, 
I may be permitted to add, that our modern Christianity 
will never be defended by any man who is not personally 
interested in the perpetuation of a contemptible unreality, 
or who does not, for some higher reason, judge it prudent 
to deprecate inquir} 7- into a system which will not bear the 
light of day. If public opinion (by w T hich I mean, not 
the so-called rationalists who write, but the so-called 
Christians, also, who approvingly read) , — if public opinion 
cared to speak its mind, public opinion would proclaim 
itself infidel to the very core, — infidel, not by any means 
as denying the extreme * respectability of a good old- 
fashioned conservative reverence for the Bible and the 
Church, — infidel, not as feeling disposed to contemplate 
without horror and alarm the bold avowal of atheistic 
tendencies in the popular mind, — infidel, not as being 
blind to the historical fact that nations without creeds 
and pious traditions have become reckless and revolution- 
ary, and abandoned to disorder and misrule, — but infidel, 
as flatly disbelieving that Christ, the very and eternal 
God, did visibly live on this material earth the life of 



Preface. 17 

poverty and pain and sorrow, which every one of us Chris- 
tians ought to be living now ; that he did visibly stretch 
his arms upon the cross, that we might crucify ourselves 
with him at every instant of every day ; that he did visibly 
mount up to heaven to make ready a place therein for 
those who are brave enough to live as he lived, and die as 
he died ; that he will visibly come again to call us trem- 
bling creatures to account for every word we speak, and 
every act we do ; that he will cast into flames intolerable, 
that shall never, never be quenched, each one of us living 
men and women who has been afraid to confess him 
boldly before all the world. This is what public opinion 
disbelieves, and what the Catholic Church proclaims. 
This, and nothing short of this, is the Christianity of 
Christ. It is either false, or it is true. If it be false, 
the sooner we alter our Christian documents, and leave off 
threatening men with judgments which will never over- 
take them, the better. If it be true, I confess myself 
wholly unable to understand how any man who seriously 
believes it, and who contemplates the horrible destiny of 
those millions of living ones who deny or ignore its truth, 
can ever cease from weeping, ox ever rise from his knees, 
unless it be that he inay go forth straightway, and implore 
his sinful brother, for whom Christ died, to escape, while 
yet escape is possible, from the yawning gulf of hell. 

Makch, 1873. 

2* 



MODERN CHRISTIANITY, Etc. 



Towards the close of this year's long vacation, 
I received a visit from an infidel friend; or 
rather, as I should perhaps say, from a friend 
who is a genuine heathen, but a naturalized 
Englishman. His grandfather, Sir Jamjeebhoy 
Curtsetjee, who received a baronetcy as a re- 
ward for having amassed an enormous fortune 
by opium-smuggling, was, no doubt, a rigorous 
Parsee; but my friend appears to have found 
the ancient tenets of his faith somewhat incon- 
venient, and to have gradually drifted into be- 
lieving in nothing whatever. I should not, on 
that account, style him as a "heathen of the 
worst class : " at any rate, if such be his unhappy 
state, he contrives so successfully to conceal his 
degradation as to pass among his fellows at Lin- 
coln's Inn for as good a Christian as most other 



19 



20 Modern Christianity, 

people. Though thoroughly well acquainted 
with the religious controversies of the day, he 
is not fond, as a general rule, of talking about 
them ; and probably nobody, excepting myself 
and half a dozen equally intimate friends, has any 
idea that he is a heathen at all. To this short 
sketch of his natural history, I will only add, that 
being a younger brother, and in no danger of 
succession to the family honors, he has had the 
good sense to abbreviate his name to Curtis ; 
that he has read, with considerable diligence, the 
Bible and other Christian books; and that he 
is distinguished, even among members of his 
own learned profession, for the remarkable vigor 
and acuteness of his mind. 

As for me, I hold a small town-living in the 
south % of England, — small, that is, in point of 
income, but a good deal larger than I like 
as regards population. However, I u keep r a 
curate, who shares my work; and, both of us 
being bachelors, we get on very well together. 
I congratulate myself the rather on this point, 
because my married friend Jones, who holds an 
adjacent rectory, can never by any chance keep 



a Civilized Heathenism. 21 

a curate for six weeks at a time. If the poor 
young man be single, Mrs. Jones sits upon him 
to that extent, that the place becomes unendur- 
able ; and, if he be married, the two wives grow 
so frightfully jealous of one another's influence 
in the parish, that it is more than the two hus- 
bands can do to keep the peace between them. 

On the whole, I am pretty comfortably off. 
I have good health, kind neighbors, and work 
which, suits me. I do not know what a man 
can wish besides, I can drive my friends from 
the station in my own trap, and give them a 
very fair bottle of claret after dinner. It was 
on this wise that I entertained my heathen 
guest some weeks ago ; and, when we had 
drunk as much wine as was good for us, we 
made ourselves very particularly snug in my 
study, over a couple of long clay pipes and a 
small September fire. 

"I see that your archbishop has been pitch- 
ing into us," observed Curtis, thro whig down 
" The Times." 

u Upon my word," answered I, "it seems to 
me that you are all making a great fuss about 



22 Modern Christianity, 

nothing! It is hard lines indeed, that a man 
can't say a few commonplace words on an ex- 
ceedingly commonplace subject, but they must 
be telegraphed all over the universe, as if he 
were a lawgiver." 

" Oh! pray don't suppose that I am going to 
quarrel with him," rejoined my friend. " From 
his point of view, he is quite right to say that 
we are in a state of darkness, and need conver 
sion. Only, if he, or any one else who holds 
with him, imagines that he is at all likely to 
convert us, he labors under a very painful de- 
lusion." 

" And why?" 

" Simply because we should scarcely think it 
worth while to make so very insignificant a 
change. We are all pretty much as he is 
already. Tell me, my dear fellow : what should 
I have to give up, if I turned Christian to- 
morrow ? " 

"Give up? Oh! why — let me see. Oh! 
you would have to give up lots of things." 

" Well, let us have one thing at a time." 

" Oh ! of course : you would have to give up 
— let me see. You don't drink, do you ? " 



a Civilized Heathenism. 23 

" About as much as you do, that is all." 

a Nor swear?" 

"No, indeed! I think the habit extremely 
weak and snobbish." 

" And I suppose your life in London, taking 
it altogether, is tolerably correct ? " 

" Every bit as correct as your own." 

" Ah, well ! you are an unusually good speci- 
men, you see. Upon my word, old fellow, I 
don't know what you would have to give up, 
exactly." 

u No, I see you don't. But Christ would 
have known. If I had put the question to him, 
he would have told me to give up all that I 
had in the world, — to fling it, as if it were 
dung, at the foot of his cross, — and then to 
follow him." 

" Oh, yes! of course," said I, knocking the 
ashes out of my pipe, and reaching out my 
hand for the pouch, preparatory to lighting up 
again. " Oh, yes! of course. If you put it in 
that way, I see what you mean." 

" I do put it in that way. That is the way, 
as far as I understand, in which every question 



24 Modern Christianity, 

touching Christianity must be put. Now, look 
here, old fellow. You won't be offended if I 
speak my mind. I am a heathen; and I don't 
believe in Christ one bit. I think the whole 
story of his coming to this earth in the highest 
degree improbable, — so improbable, that only 
one sort of evidence would induce me to accept 
it as a fact That sort of evidence I do not 
find to be forthcoming ; and therefore I reject 
the entire narrative as mythical and absurd." 

u And, pray, what sort of evidence is it which 
would convince you ? " 

" The steadfast, personal witness to Christ, of 
those who profess to believe in him. I myself 
deny that any such person ever lived ; but, 
supposing he did live, there can be no question 
whatever what he said and did, and commanded 
his disciples to say and do ; for, however diffi- 
cult the interpretation of your Bible may some- 
times be with regard to doctrine, in the matter 
of practical conduct it is absolutely consistent 
from beginning to end. The text of the entire 
New Testament enjoins one leading principle, 
which no child can, misunderstand ; and that 






a Civilized Heathenism. 25 

principle is the downright literal renunciation 
of this present world. Every species of self- 
indulgence is declared to be sinful. The Chris- 
tian is to permit himself no kind of pleasure, 
but the pleasure which comes to him out of 
communion with Christ. At every point, in 
season and out of season, he is to fight with 
all his strength against the spirit of worldliness ; 
and, lest there should arise any mistake about 
terms, worldliness is over and over again defined, 
with palpable clearness, to be every thing and 
any thing outside Christ. Without immediate 
reference to Christ, as to a personal guide stand- 
ing ever by, no action is to be performed, no 
word spoken, no thought conceived. This is the 
sort of life which the founder of Christianity 
has bidden his disciples lead. Will you kindly 
tell me how many of them lead it? " 

u My dear fellow, you expect impossibilities. 
We are but human ; and no man on earth could 
lead the life which you describe." 

" Then Christ has commanded what is contra- 
dictory and absurd, and Christianity becomes 
ridiculous; which is precisely my own opinion. 



26 Modern Christianity^ 

I don't know who made this earth, and I don't 
care ; but the very fact that it is fair and win- 
ning seems to me to justify men in thoroughly 
enjoying themselves while they live in it. But, 
if I were a Christian, I should not think so ; for 
Christ has explained in the simplest terms this 
very mystery. He says, 4 You shall take your 
choice. This world is filled with allurements 
and delights in order that your strength of pur- 
pose may be tried. If you like to enjoy the good 
things which it has to offer, enjoy them, and lose 
your reward hereafter : but if, for love towards 
me, you are content to sacrifice all that gives 
you pleasure on earth, and to follow, step by 
step, my pure and self-denying life, you shall 
have tribulation here ; but joy, such as never 
entered into the heart of man, shall be your 
portion in heaven.' Now, you Christians appear 
to think that you can have as much of this 
world's pleasure as you care to have, and secure 
the pleasures of the world to come besides." 

" We don't think any thing of the kind," said 
I; u but you can't expect our faith and practice 
to be everywhere and always consistent." 



a Civilized Heathenism. 27 

" No ; I expect nothing half so unreasonable. 
But my charge against you is not that you are 
inconsistent, and that you fall, through weak- 
ness of the flesh, far short of the standard set 
for your imitation, but that you claim it is a 
right, and uphold it as a duty, to mix just as 
freely with the world as if you were heathens. 
In this matter the modern Christian, with con- 
summate impudence, flatly gives the lie to every 
precept of his Master. Christ says, 'Renounce 
the world. Come out of it. Have nothing to 
do with it. It is utterly opposed to me ; and, if 
you would be my disciple, you must take care 
that it be utterly opposed to you.' The modern 
Christian says, c I shall do nothing of the kind. 
On the contrary, I conceive it to be my special 
business to remain in the world, to do very 
much as other people do, and to show all men 
how possible it is to serve God, and conform to 
the usages of society, as well.' Christ says, 
4 Strip yourself of your wealth. Give it up to 
me, — all, all of it, — and make yourself poor, 
that I may enrich you with treasures in heaven.' 
The modern Christian says, c No. I don't 



28 Modern Christianity^ 

believe that any such tremendous sacrifice is 
required of me. The good things of this world 
were bestowed upon us that we might enjoy 
them ; and so long as I am moderately chari- 
table in my gifts, and refrain from indulging to 
excess, there can be no reason why I should not 
keep my money.' Christ says, c When thou 
makest a feast, call the poor.' The modern 
Christian says, 'By no means. I shall do 
nothing so absurd. The duties of my station 
require me to keep up my social rank, and to 
dine only with my friends and equals.' . Christ 
says " — 

"Well," interrupted I rather angrily, " you 
need not say any more. I could say it all for 
you. Of course, if once you come to talk like 
that, you can condemn us and our conventionali- 
ties at every point. But how is it possible that 
we can act otherwise ? If everybody did liter- 
ally as Christ has bidden him, the world could 
not go on." 

"Precisely so. And that is the reason why I 
disbelieve in your religion ; because it reduces 
all things to an absurdity. But you have no 



a ' Civilized Heathenism. 2 9 

right to think that it does so. Surely, you are 
bound, as a man of honor, to accept Christ, 
absurdities and all; or else to reject him alto- 
gether. No doubt, the world could not go on. 
But did it never occur to you, my friend, that 
Christ, if he came on earth at all, must have 
come for the very purpose of preventing the 
world from going on ? He found it going on, 
going on fast enough, and something to spare. 
He came expressly to stop it. He came to 
defeat its progress and prosperity, and to subdue 
its kingdoms to himself. What are the maxims 
of political economy to Christ ? What are the 
intricacies of commercial business to Christ ? 
What are the customs of polite society to 
Christ? He wants your life, and the life of 
every creature for whom you say he died, to 
be given up without reserve to him. He wants 
your churches to be thronged with faithful wor- 
shippers, singing his praises all day long. He 
wants your homes to be pure and lovely, bright 
with the virtues which your children have 
copied direct from him. The world could not 

go on, indeed! No: if Christians lived as 
3* 



30 Modern Christianity, 

Christ has bidden them, they would create a 
revolution ; and a revolution would be in- 
convenient. Therefore Christians very wisely 
determine to drift along quietly with the world, 
and let well alone." 

" I think you are nam upon us, Curtis ; I do, 
indeed. You must admit that Christianity has 
wrought a great change. See how much purer 
and better the world is than it was when Christ 
came." 

u Is it ? I very much doubt the fact. Of 
course, people are more civilized than they were 
eighteen hundred years ago. But Christ need 
not have come upon this earth to civilize it. 
Time, and the natural development of the human 
mind, would have done that. Or, if you think 
that time alone would not have done it, at any 
rate, it would have been sufficient that some 
philosopher — some very good man, and no- 
thing more — should give mankind the benefit 
of his teaching. If Christ be all that you say 
he is, you will scarcely put forward the state of 
social or public life in this country, or in any 
other, as a satisfactory result of his work and 
mission." 



a Civilized Heathenism. 31 

ct No, indeed ! He came to save souls." 
" To save those only who would lose their life 
on earth for his sake. My dear fellow, you are 
in a desperate difficulty. You are defending an 
illogical position ; and such positions refuse to 
be defended. Christ says distinctly, that you 
cannot serve God and mammon ; and you Chris- 
tians, with one consent, have steadily resolved 
that that is precisely the thing which you will 
do. You are serving God and mammon every 
day. And you do so, not by reason of incon- 
sistencies, which would be pardonable enough, 
but as a matter of deliberate purpose, because 
you believe it to be your privilege or your 
duty. And, as far as I can judge, you good 
folks who call yourselves High Churchmen are 
the worst offenders of all. The old Evangeli- 
cals, who led the religious revival fifty or sixty 
years ago, although so one-sided in doctrine as 
to alienate all men with Church tendencies, 
were far more nearly right in their ideas about 
Christian practice. Their preachers did, at any 
rate, denounce with bravery every kind of 
worldliness, and warn men that the whole 



32 Modern Christianity ', 

heart, and not a certain part of it, must be 
yielded up to Christ. But when they collapsed 
for want of churchrnanship, and the Tractarians 
took their place, straightway, as if out of pure 
perversity and spite, these last permitted their 
disciples to indulge in an almost unlimited 
amount of secularity. Because the Simeonites 
had said that balls and operas were sinful, the 
Puseyites must needs maintain that it was al- 
most a duty, among people of a certain rank in 
life, to patronize both the one and the other. 
And so, when the Belgravian fine lady, who has 
been lounging and frittering away her morning 
after a fashion of which any intelligent heathen 
would be ashamed, bids her coachman set her 
down at All Saints, Margaret Street, at five 
o'clock, where she pays, with many crossings and 
bowings, what she is pleased to call her evening 
devotions to an almost unknown God, instead 
of being rebuked for her hypocrisy, she is very 
much applauded for her churchrnanship, and is 
told that such a jumbling together of temporal 
and spiritual avocations is quite the correct 
thing. Indeed, the sight of such a woman in- 



a Civilized Heathenism. 33 

side a church is enough to condemn your entire 
religious system. Look at her, whether she be 
Belgravian fine lady, or wife of the moderately 
affluent parson, or an example drawn from any 
conceivable class between the two. Look at 
her, with her bracelets, her diamonds, her 
pearls ; look at her dress, the very materials of 
which would buy coals enough to keep ten old 
women warm throughout the winter. Why 
does not the parson tell her to strip herself of 
her ghastly ornaments, and give to the poor ? 
Would Christ have tolerated such a woman in 
his presence for a single instant, without ad- 
ministering such a rebuke as would have rung 
in her ears till her dying-day ? Look at her 
at home, with her lazy habits, and her profitless 
pursuits, and her silly conversation. Look at 
her drawing-room, with its costly mirrors, its 
luxurious sofas, its drapery, and its gilding. 
Christian, indeed ! Why, you must know per- 
fectly well that Christ could not sit in such 
a room, could not stand in it, could not so 
much as look in at the doorway, without 
condemning the monstrous iniquity of such 



34 Modern Christianity, 

wholesale waste and self-indulgence. Will the 
parson look in at the doorway too, and tell her 
this? Not he. It would not be good taste, 
forsooth ; and I should not be surprised if her 
ladyship were to say that he was no gentleman." 
" My dear friend," said I, u you are talking a 
vast amount of nonsense. How could I possibly 
tell a lady to strip off her jewels, and give them 
to the poor ? The people would all think me 
mad, and I should lose half my influence in the 
parish for ever and ever. And, as for drawing- 
room luxuries, you must understand that Chris- 
tianity does not pretend to lay down laws about 
the furnishing of private houses. People must 
live according to their means. Besides, you 
are most unjust and most uncharitable. I dare 
say that the sort of woman you are describing 
is an excellent wife and mother, doing her duty 
in the state of life to which she has been called, 
generous to the poor, good-natured to her 
friends, and full of kindly feelings and liberal 
deeds. There are dozens of such persons in my 
own parish; and it would be an uncommonly 
good thing for society in general, if there were 



a Civilized Heathenism. 35 

dozens more. I am sure we cannot afford to 
run such people down. 1 ' 

" I don't run them down at all. I am per- 
fectly satisfied with them. The thing which 
does not satisfy me is, that you should have the 
assurance to claim such people as Christians. 
They are not Christians at all. They are 
civilized heathens. Heathen is not a bad word.' 
It does not mean cannibal. It simply means 
one who does not believe in God; and a man 
may decline to believe in God, and yet may talk 
and act like a decent member of society. You 
Christians have contrived to make the word 
offensive by quietly appropriating all virtue 
and goodness to yourselves, and speaking of us 
poor heathen with a pious shudder, as if we 
were in a helpless state of darkness and ferocity. 
We thank you kindly for your compassion ; but 
we beg to say that we are accustomed to meet 
in society, every day of our lives, dozens of men, 
and dozens of women too, who never say a 
prayer, and dozens more, calling themselves 
Christians, who pray after such a fashion, that 
they might just as well save themselves the 



36 Modern Christianity^ 

trouble. We meet, I say, continually, dozens of 
men and women living utterly without God, 
heathen from head to foot, who would not do 
a mean or immoral or unkind action, and would 
not willingly say one syllable which could dis- 
tress a friend, for any consideration in the 
world.'' 

u Then I say that such persons, whatever 
their religious professions may be, are practi- 
cally Christians." 

"I say that they are nothing of the kind. 
They disbelieve in Christ entirely, and, as a 
necessary consequence, disbelieve in heaven 
and hell. Whatever virtues they exhibit in 
their lives are heathen virtues, common to all 
civilized humanity. They are in no sense in- 
debted to Christ for the instinct which prompts 
them to be good-natured and straightforward. 
It suits the purpose of you Christians to pre- 
tend that all such virtues are graces bestowed 
in answer to prayer ; but I tell you that men 
who never pray, and never have prayed, 
possess the highest and best of virtues iii abun- 
dance, and practise them continually. What ! 



a Civilized Heathenism. 37 

is there no good-nature, no kindliness of heart, 
no generous impulse, excepting among those 
who profess your creed ? Am I a savage, be- 
cause I do not believe in Christ ? Were the 
ancient Greeks and Romans bloodthirsty and 
brutal, and devoid of all natural affection and 
honor ? You, if you have ever read any clas- 
sics, must know that they were nothing of the 
kind. I make bold to say that there does not 
exist one essential point of difference between 
the fine lady of Grosvenor Square and the fine 
lady of Athens or of Rome, except this only, — 
that whereas the one, towards the close of each 
day's frivolity, pays her devotions at St. Paul's, 
Knightsbridge, or All Saints, the other per- 
formed a similar act of worship at the tem- 
ple of her god. Of course, in numberless little 
points of culture, the modern lady will be found 
to surpass the ancient ; but this is a matter of 
civilization, and has nothing whatever to do 
with Christianity." 

" I beg your pardon. It has every thing to 
do with Christianity." 

"'Then, as I said before, you claim, as the 
4 



38 Modern Christianity, 

result of Christ's mission upon earth, that, after 
eighteen centuries of gospel preaching, he has 
made the fine l.ady of Christian England a trifle 
more good-natured than the fine lady of heathen 
Greece. Truly, a most glorious triumph ! No, 
no, my friend. If God ever humbled himself 
to be born of a woman, it was to make some 
greater difference in woman's life than this. It 
was that he might drag the fine lady from her 
carriage and her boudoir, and clothe her in 
homely garments, and plant her by the bedside 
of the sick and dying, — plant her there, not as 
a casual visitor, condescending to stoop from 
her greatness just once in a way, but plant her 
there, and bid her live and grow there, making 
it her adopted dwelling-place, where she might 
brighten with her simple goodness the abode of 
poverty, and perhaps of sin." 

" But, my dear Curtis, many of our women 
already do this sort of work, and do it admira- 
bly well." 

"I am not speaking of those who do it, but 
of those who don't. Will you maintain that a 
hundredth part of those who might do it are 



a Civilized Heathenism. 39 

thus engaged? And have you the courage, 
under your present refined system of religious 
teaching, have you the courage to tell one fine 
lady to her face, as you hand her down to 
dinner, that this is the work to which her life 
should be devoted ? " 

" Yes, I think I could dare to tell her so, if 
I thought it wise. But I should not think it 
wise, by any means. You appear to me to mis- 
understand entirely the object of Christianity, 
and the essential conditions of a Christian life. 
Christ never intended to make us all monks 
and sisters of mercy. What a very stupid, hum- 
drum world this would be, with nothing but 
hermits in it ! " 

"And what a very stupid, humdrum place 
heaven must be, with nothing but saints and 
angels in it ! " 

" Don't interrupt me, old fellow. You really 
must be practical. My idea is, that Christ came 
to make men good citizens, useful members of 
society, kind neighbors, conscientious doers of 
such work as their several stations in fife re- 
quire. He came to teach us great principles, 



40 Modern Christianity, 

and lofty motives of action, to shed the love 
of God in our hearts, and to sanctify our homes. 
If, therefore, a man performs his business dili- 
gently, speaks the truth, says his prayers, and 
gives what he can spare to the poor, I call him 
a good Christian ; and I say that he is doing all 
that Christ expects of him. Some, no doubt, 
are called to higher deeds than others. Some 
are bidden to make painful sacrifices, and noble 
efforts of self-denial. But the ordinary Christian 
may be content if he earns his living honestly, 
believes in Christ faithfully, and resists the Devil 
manfully." 

" In short, he may be content if he attains 
the level of a highly cultivated heathen. I 
quite agree with you. That is precisely the 
level which I trust that I have attained myself ; 
and it satisfies me moderately well. My heathen 
code prescribes for me almost the identical rules 
of life which you have laid down for your ordi- 
nary Christian. As for resisting the Devil, and 
believing in Christ, your Bible makes it plain 
that no man does either the one or the other to 
any purpose, whose life does not proclaim his 



a Civilized Heathenism. 41 

efforts to all the world. Unless, therefore, your 
model Christian be one who can be distinguished 
at a glance from his fellow-men, by his uncom- 
promising abhorrence of evil, and his . fearless 
devotion to his Master's name, — in which case 
he becomes at once my ideal of a true follower 
of Christ, and ceases to be yours, — we may leave 
out the two last items of your definition, and 
consider the others only. Well, then, like the 
. Christian, I must work: if I don't, I am a 
sluggard, and not a man. Like him, I must be 
temperate in my habits : if not, I become a 
brute, and not an intellectual being. Like him, 
I must be civil and considerate : if not, I am a 
cur, and not a gentleman. All these things, 
however, I learn, not in any sense from Chris- 
tianity, but from civilization. And it is of such 
men as myself that the decently behaved ma- 
jority in your Christian world is composed. 
You have made an egregious mistake in calling 
this country of yours a Christian country. It 
is nothing of the sort. It is a genuine heathen 
country. Its principles are heathen ; its policy 

is heathen; its laws are heathen. Look at 
4* 



42 Modem Christianity^ 

that newspaper on the table. From the first 
column to the last it is utterly heathen ; and it 
forms the expression of public opinion through- 
out the land. I am not abusing it. I delight 
in it. I read my c Times ' every day, and my 
1 Saturday ' every week. I don't always agree 
with what they say, though I usually find, that, 
on most subjects of general interest, they take 
a sound and sensible view ; but it is always a 
purely heathen view. The editors themselves 
would not pretend that it is otherwise. It is 
the view of writers who leave Christ entirely 
out of the question, who would never dream 
of stopping to consider what Christ might have 
to say about this or that. They would laugh 
at you, if you suggested such a thing. The 
public press is concerned with the rights of 
the people, the prosperity of the country, and 
the temporal welfare of mankind. It utterly 
ignores Christ and Christianity. And yet you 
Christians read it, regulate your opinion by 
it, and suffer it to influence insensibly your 
thoughts, your principles, your moral tone. 
And all the while you cannot doubt, that, if 



a Civilized Heathenism. 43 

Christ should come on earth again, the very 
first thing he would do would be to denounce 
the modern newspaper as godless and devilish 
and abominable. How could he do otherwise ? 
Is it conceivable that Christ and c The Times ' 
should exist together ? that He whose purpose 
it is to subdue the hearts of all men to himself 
should suffer them, at one and the same moment, 
to be subdued by a power so gigantic as the 
voice of public opinion? Could he permit, do 
you suppose, the discussion of creeds and doc- 
trines on the heathen principle of common- 
sense, and not on the Christian principle of what 
God has chosen to reveal ? Of course he could 
not : the two systems are as fire and water. 
And the very fact that you parsons allow c The 
Times ' to be brought to your house, shows 
plainly enough how you have abandoned Chris- 
tianity, and drifted quietly into civilization. I 
do not blame you. I rejoice to think that you 
should have had the good sense to discard what 
I believe to be an obsolete and foolish super- 
stition. But I am bound to say that the course 
you have taken seems to me one of very 



44 Modern Christianity y 

questionable honesty. Christ has told you to 
fight vigorously against the world : you have 
coolly made peace with it. Nay, he has de- 
clared this incessant conflict to be the very 
condition of your membership with him : you 
have repudiated the conditions, while yet you 
claim the membership. Christ has said that the 
joys of this life are wholly incompatible with 
the joys of the life to come : you Christians take 
your fill of pleasure on this earth, and expect 
to have pleasure also in heaven. In your 
amusements, you go just the length which we 
heathen go, and stop short exactly where we 
stop short, — at that point, namely, where 
pleasure begins to pall upon the fancy, and self- 
indulgence interferes with business or with 
health. Whatever delights common-sense per- 
mits to heathens, Christianity permits to 
Christians, and upon precisely the same terms, 
— that they be moderately indulged. Surely 
you cannot be honest in maintaining a position 
so extremely like our own. You ought to be 
fighting with us for your very life. I am very 
glad that you are not fighting. I greatly prefer 



a Civilized Heathenism. 45 

peace to war. But, then, any child can see that 
you have made peace by the simple process 
of surrender. As Archdeacon Denison said the 
other day, we have heard a good deal lately 
about church defence : what we ought to be 
hearing about is church aggression. At pres- 
ent, the Church and the world get on as 
harmoniously together as if they had every 
interest and every principle in common. Look 
at your bench of bishops. There they are, 
some six and twenty of them, successors of 
Christ, specially appointed to take his place on 
earth till he comes to claim his kingdom. I 
should just like to know what single thing they 
are doing which he would do if he were here. 
There they are, pre-eminent among men, not 
for their humility, and the sanctity of their 
lives, but for their social rank, as peers of this 
mighty realm. There they are, with their 
five thousand pounds a year, and upwards, — 
an income not to be spent upon the spiritual 
wants of their respective dioceses, but upon 
themselves and their children. There they are, 
with their palaces in the country, and their 



46 Modern Christianity, 

mansions in Belgrave Square, dining pleasantly 
with their equals in the fashionable world, and 
never guilty, mark you, of such shocking bad 
taste as to denounce the frightful luxury of 
aristocratic life as a deadly sin, or tell a spend- 
thrift nobleman to his face that such pursuits 
as pigeon-slaughtering and horse-racing are 
leading him anywhere else rather than to 
heaven. It is all very well for your archbishop 
to talk about converting us poor heathen. Let 
him try his hand, first, at the conversion of the 
house of lords. Why, if he would speak and 
act like his Master Christ, for one single week, 
he would not have a friend left in London. If 
he, and the rest of the bishops with him, would 
issue a solemn protest against the wickedness 
and extravagance of the rich, they would make 
themselves at once so absolutely offensive, that 
no man of wealth or rank would ever receive 
them into his house again. And this, and 
nothing less than this, as you know far better 
than I do, is what Christ would do." 

"My dear Curtis," said I, trying to look hor- 
rified, u you should not talk in such a way about 
the dignitaries of the Church." 



a Civilized Heathenism. 47 

" Dignitaries of the Church, indeed! Why 
the very existence of such a class is a flat con- 
tradiction and insult to the teaching of Christ. 
If your c dignitaries ' want to convert the world, 
let them go about in forma pauperis, and wash 
the saints' feet. But I perceive, my dear fellow, 
that you are determined to misunderstand my 
line. I tell you again that I, as a heathen, am 
perfectly satisfied with things as they are. I 
look upon your archbishop, and your bishops, 
and all your clergy, with profound respect. I 
think them an excellent, industrious, energetic, 
and gentlemanly set of men. All I say is, that 
they are not Christians : they are heathens. 
I do not say that they are savages. You good 
people have given heathenism such a bad name, 
that one is constantly obliged to stop short, and 
apologize for using it, and to explain that one 
does not contemplate the case of a gentleman 
in paint and feathers, who dines off his neigh- 
bor. When I speak of a heathen, as distin- 
guished from a Christian, I intend no greater 
insult than when I say that a Prussian is not a 
Portuguese. I know very well what Christ 



48 Modern Christianity^ 

was like ; and I can see that your priests and 
bishops, as regards their attitude towards 
society, at least, are as unlike him as they can 
possibly be. They have absolutely nothing in 
common with him. They are outside his system 
altogether. They follow his teaching just so 
far as he taught principles which are common 
to Christians and heathen alike ; and they cast 
him off at the very point where he becomes 
distinctively Christ, and ceases to be a mere 
philosopher. They are simply professors in a 
school, of which Christ was the historical 
founder, — a school, without question, the most 
perfect in organization, and the purest in 
morals, which the world has ever known ; but 
a school, nevertheless, and nothing more. It 
will last its time, just as other schools have 
lasted ; and then it will collapse, and give way 
to something better, or something, at any rate, 
which better suits the temper of the age. 
There are not wanting signs of such a dissolution 
even now. That which was to make Christian 
truth durable, nay, eternal, was just this, — that 
it was not a school of philosophy, but the king- 



a Civilized Heathenism. 49 

dom of God; that it was not of earth, but of 
heaven ; that it was not material or carnal, but 
spiritual, mysterious, supernatural. If Christi- 
anity be not literally this, it is nothing. If 
Christ be not absolute king of the hearts and 
consciences of men, he is nothing. If the 
graces and sacraments of Christ be not powerful 
enough to make his priests, amid countless in- 
firmities of the flesh, the very and exact repre- 
sentation of himself to sinners, they are nothing. 
The moment you regard Christianity in the 
light of a secular philosophy, it breaks down ; 
for the simple reason that it is contrary to 
common-sense, and does perpetual violence to 
the natural instincts of mankind. This feature 
of his teaching, as Christ himself took pains to 
show, is the one feature which separates that 
teaching from the philosophies, and makes it 
Christian. It cannot exist in the empire of the 
intellect and the region of human prosperity, 
because it came on purpose to destroy them 
both. It was expressly meant to be laughed at 
and scoffed at by unbelievers, just as Christ was 
laughed at and scoffed at in his day. Nobody 



50 Modern Christianity, 

laughs at Christianity in its popular modern 
phase: there is nothing left to laugh at. It 
has cast away all that was ridiculous in the sight 
of men, and has become decent and plausible 
and inoffensive. It does not dare so much as to 
hold its own against any nameless writer in 4 The 
Times.' The obscurest heathen need only say 
that such and such a stern precept of Christ is 
contrary to the spirit of the age ; and Christianity 
politely agrees with him, and drops that precept 
out of its moral code. My dear fellow, let us 
bring the matter to a test. Was not Christ 
laughed to scorn by one half of his unbelieving 
hearers, and cruelly persecuted by the other ? " 

u Yes, no doubt he was; but circumstances 
were then so very different. Men do not laugh 
at Christianity now, not because Christianity has 
changed, but because they have learned to 
believe in it. Christ has subdued them to him- 
self; and the kingdoms of this world have 
become the kingdom of Christ." 

" Will you dare to look me in the face and 
tell me so, when civilized society has made 
itself totally independent of Christ ; when Eng- 



a Civilized Heathenism. 51 

land, from north to south, has given herself over 
to luxury ; and the sin of London alone cries 
out to Heaven a hundred-fold more loudly 
than the sin of Babylon, or Nineveh, or Tyre ? 
Don't be angry with me, dear friend ; but you 
parsons are so abominably unreal ! The king- 
doms of this world become the kingdom of 
Christ ! Good gracious ! Why, I never go to 
one of your churches, but the clergyman begins 
to preach about 'these dangerous days,' and 
protests with all his vigor that l there never was 
a time when infidelity was so rampant, or vice 
so flagrant.' And now you have the assurance 
to tell me that Christ has subdued the world. 
It seems to me, that, when you want to make a 
point in your Sunday's sermon, you declare that 
we are all under the dominion of the Devil ; 
and, when you are taunted with not having 
made much progress in the work of recovering 
us from his grasp, you admit that we are not so 
very bad, after all." 

" Nevertheless," I answered, " there can be 
no doubt that Christianity was intended to 
accommodate itself to the laws of human progress 



52 Modern Christianity, 

and the changes of society. It could not be, 
now, in England, precisely the same as it was 
nearly two thousand years ago in Judaea. 
Besides, there are numerous sayings of our Lord, 
which were clearly never meant to be received 
in their literal sense." 

"-I deny that utterly," said Curtis in reply. 
"Your modern theory on this point is a bare- 
faced assumption, for which neither Christ, nor 
any one of the New-Testament writers, gives 
you the faintest spark of authority. Whatever 
he commanded, he expects you literally to 
perform ; and you have no right to filter away 
his words until they enunciate a mere abstract 
piece of philosophic wisdom, which the heathen 
and the Christian may both alike accept. In 
the whole range of heathen history, I never yet 
heard of any thing so palpably dishonest as the 
way in which you Christians have repudiated 
the words of Christ. It passes my comprehen- 
sion, how you can stand at your desk, and read 
a chapter out of the gospel, without sinking 
into the earth for shame. Every sentence of 
your lips condemns you. I won't insult you 



a Civilized Heatfienism. 53 

with quotations; but you must be able to recall 
verse upon verse of Christian precept, which 
you parsons have long ago agreed among your- 
selves to regard as obsolete and unpractical. 
To you, just as much as to us, Christianity and 
Christ have become ridiculous. My dear friend, 
if Christ were to come now in human flesh, how 
should you receive him ? " 

"I am scarcely bound," said I, " to answer a 
question so absurd. Christ could not come now. 
This is not the time appointed for his coming. 
He came when God saw fit to send him ; and 
that time is past." 

" Still, I suppose it is conceivable that God 
should have been pleased to send him now. 
What special unfitness of time or place should 
hinder his appearing next week in London, if it 
had been so decreed ? " 

" But it was not so decreed. Fitness of time 
and place made it necessary that he should 
appear in Bethlehem eighteen hundred and 
seventy years ago." 

u Perhaps you think that the people in Lon- 
don are a little too civilized just now to make 
his appearance among them a success ? " 



54 Modern Christianity, 

"I think nothing about it. It could not 
possibly happen." 

" Perhaps we good folks nowadays are a 
little too clever, just a trifle more knowing, 
don't you see, than might have been conven- 
ient." 

"Don't talk in such a horrible way!" said 
I ; for I felt that the man was becoming blas- 
phemous. 

"Then I am to understand," continued he, 
"that Christ could only have come to earth 
successfully, on condition of his choosing an 
obscure country, and hitting upon a time' when 
there were no special correspondents to find out 
all about him, no photographers to show us 
exactly what he was like, and no telegraphic 
wires to carry his words of wisdom from one 
continent to another ? If you, a minister of 
Christ, are prepared to admit as much as this, 
you can hardly wonder that intelligent laymen 
should disbelieve." 

" Since you press me," said I, " perhaps one 
reason in the divine counsels might have been 
this, — that the Son of God should be spared the 



a Civilized Heathenism. 55 

additional insults and indignities to which his 
appearance in a civilized country would have 
exposed him." 

u Ah! now we are coming to the point. And 
what would those additional insults and indigni- 
ties be? What should you Christians do to 
Christ if he came to London ? " 

" Believe in him, of course. Why, do you 
really suppose that we should crucify him ? " 

u No, you would not crucify him: it is not 
the custom of the day. But I tell you what 
you would do. You would laugh at him, and 
hoot at him, and have him locked up in a mad- 
house. He would offend you, every bit as 
much as he offended the scribes and Pharisees. 
He would interfere with your life every bit as 
much as he interfered with theirs. His per- 
sistent, uncompromising abhorrence of the mild- 
est form of sin would appear just as extrava- 
gant to you as it did to Herod. It seems to me, 
my friend, that the blind, benighted heathen has 
given you a tolerably fair test by which to try 
your Christianity. You have no right whatever 
to say that Christ could not have come in 1872 ; 



56 Modern Christianity \ 

and the fact that you think the idea so foolish 
casts a very grave suspicion on the sincerity of 
your own belief. It is a relief to you to 
recollect that an event so extraordinary took 
place at a time when the observation of men 
was not quite so acute as it is now, and when 
the credentials of the chief actor in the scene 
were not likely to be too critically or scientifi- 
cally examined. You have not courage to face 
the contemplation of a poor despised figure 
walking wearily through the streets of some 
modern city, and claiming to be your Lord. 
You feel by no means certain that you would 
not laugh at him as he passed along. And so 
you pretend, that, although such a visitation 
would be unfitting now, it was fitting enough 
eighteen hundred years ago. What wonder, as 
I said before, that when you, who profess to 
believe the gospel, are glad to thrust as far 
away from you as possible the vision of a 
personal, living Christ, men of a doubting or 
speculative turn of mind should find it hard to 
persuade themselves that he ever lived at all ? 
But, in shirking thus the difficulties of your 



a Civilized Heathenism. 57 

belief, you do not ultimately escape them. If 
God had so designed it, Christ might, with 
perfect fitness, have come to London in this 
present year. There is nothing whatever in 
the condition of our modern society which 
forbids such an hypothesis to stand. Civilization 
would, indeed, have made some difference in the 
form of insult cast upon him, and in the mode 
of death which he should eventually die ; but 
civilization could make no difference in this, — 
that, whenever and wherever he appeared, he 
would have done violence to the tastes and 
habits of the vast majority of mankind. A tiny 
band would have clung to him in England, just 
as a tiny band clung to him in Galilee ; but, to 
society at large, he must ever have been a posi- 
tive offence, and to your pleasant gentlemanly 
priests and bishops the most palpable offence of 
all;' 

" I don't think you have any right to say so," 
objected I ; " but it is useless to argue such a 
question. Of course, if he had come in this 
present century, he would have come in a totally 
different form." 



58 Modern Christianity, 

14 In what form ? In the form of a modern 
prelate, softly clad, and sleek, with a couple of 
palaces, and fifteen thousand pounds a year ? I 
very particularly doubt it. Whatever guise he 
took, it would be that of one whom men de- 
spise ; whatever words he spoke, they would be 
words which make men gnash their teeth to 
hear ; whatever deeds he wrought, they would 
be deeds so flatly opposed to worldly sense and 
worldly wisdom, as to cover him with ridicule 
and abuse. In such a guise, and with such 
words and deeds, unless the whole story of his 
life is an imposture, he must infallibly be dwell- 
ing among his people still. You have read 
your gospel superficially indeed, if you have 
not gathered from it this, — that whereas the 
philosophers could but teach, and establish a 
sect, and die, Christ would abide with his 
Church forever. Patriarchs and prophets had 
striven darkly and dimly to represent God to 
man ; and they had failed. Christ was now to 
produce a«form of testimony altogether new, — 
a testimony real, ever present, personal, — a tes- 
timony which should proclaim the truth as 



a Civilized HeatJienism. 59 

plainly in modern Paris, or London, or Berlin, as 
in Jerusalem or Galilee of old. Henceforth, 
men were not to hear of God, but to see him, — 
to see him, triumphing in every martyr's death, 
glorified by each confessor's courage, shining in 
the pure devotion of his faithful priests, win- 
some with the grace and loveliness of holy 
women who had dedicated their lives to him. 
Herein, and herein alone, does Christ become 
any thing better than the founder of a school. 
He is risen, you say ; he has ascended up again 
to heaven. But his Spirit, if he be Christ at all, 
must linger here ; and, if his Spirit has any 
strength that can rightly be called divine, it 
must be manifesting him with a brightness which 
cannot be hid, wherever his saints and children 
dwell. Tell me, my friend, whereabouts such 
a place may be. It is not in your churches, 
where congregations of good-natured, worldly- 
minded men and women offer up prayers to God, 
with lips so insincere, that they might just as well 
be offering them up to Jupiter. It is not in 
your bishops' palaces, where the apostles of a 
homeless, footsore Jesus maintain with befitting 



60 Modern Christianity^ 

pomp and circumstance the dignity of the epis- 
copal chair. It is not in the snug country 
parsonage, where the rector has settled himself 
comfortably in the midst of rural poverty and 
distress, and his charming wife and daughters 
fare sumptuously every day. Such men, believe 
me, cannot be Christ to the thirsty, perishing 
multitudes; and, because they are not Christ, 
they are nothing. That which men were yearn- 
ing for, as the fulness of God's time drew near, 
was personal witness. Christ came, and gave it 
them. That which men are yearning for now, 
crying for from street and garret and death-bed, 
aye, and from the closet of the student search- 
ing after truth, and the haunts of the man of 
fashion, who would fain be something better 
than he is, is personal witness. You Christian 
priests won't give it them. You persistently 
withhold it. You dare not be to the world what 
Christ was. You boast that your religion suf- 
fers you to live as other men, to enjoy the 
pleasures of society, and indulge in moderation 
your natural desires, just as the well-conducted 
layman may. You have not the pluck to tell 



a Civilized Heathenism. 61 

the squire to his face that his life from Sunday 
to Sunday, purposeless, idle, frivolous, if nothing 
worse, is a disgrace to your Christian village, and 
a transgression of the law of God. You dare 
not tell him so : if you did, he might, with some 
propriety, retort that your life was but little 
different from his own. 

"I can't see why you should say that the 
average squire's life is a bad life." 

" I don't say it is a bad life : I say it is not a 
Christian life. It is the life of a good-natured, 
gentlemanly heathen. Look at the ordinary 
pursuits of such a man. One of the best of 
them probably will be fox-hunting" — 

"And a thoroughly noble, manly pastime 
too." 

u Extremely noble, for fifty red-coated heroes 
to chase a wretched little quadruped from cover 
to cover, and from field to field, watching the 
hungry dogs as they drive the breath inch by 
inch out of his body, till at last they fall upon 
their victim, and (as your great authority, the 
Reverend Mr. Daniel, says they ought to do if 
they are decently trained hounds) devour him 



62 Modern Christianity, 

ferociously I As a matter of opinion, I confess 
that I call such sport brutal and cowardly. 
Nevertheless, if it be found necessary, in order 
to keep the country gentleman at home, and 
attach him to his tenantry, I can afford to 
admit, from a heathen point of view, that the 
end justifies the means. But how such a sport 
can be designated as Christian is more than I 
can understand. Is it possible to imagine 
Christ, under any conceivable circumstances, 
taking pleasure in hunting an animal to death? 
In a Christian aspect, such a pursuit has not 
even the excuse of supplying a needful occupa- 
tion, because the squire ought to be fully 
occupied already in improving the cottages of 
his poor, building alms-houses for the aged, 
beautifying, to the full extent of his resources, 
the temple wherein he worships his God, and 
preparing his soul for the judgment-day. 
These are the Christian duties of a country 
gentleman. But you parsons dare not tell him 
so. He would call you a parcel of old women ; 
and you prefer to stand well with him, and to 
be thought muscular and manly. I was told, 



a Civilized Heathenism. 63 

not long ago, by one whose person and office 
I cannot but respect, — I was told, as a thing 
much to be admired, of a certain exemplary 
squire who was accustomed to ride home 
from hunting, towards the hour of evensong, 
by way of the parish church, throw his bridle 
to the groom, enter the sacred building, put on 
a surplice over his scarlet coat, and read the 
lessons for the minister. All I can say is, that 
this gentleman's ideas of right and wrong, if, 
indeed, he had any ideas at all, must have been 
jumbled together in such inextricable confusion, 
that I wonder the very effort of thinking did 
not drive him mad. And, concerning the 
parson who encouraged a phase of Christianity 
so peculiar, I will only remark, that the fact of 
such .a scene being permitted to take place, with 
the sanction, apparently, of the bishop, and the 
general approval of churchmen, justifies in 
every point my opinion, that your modern 
average priests are veritable heathen philoso- 
phers, and not ministers of Christ at all." 

u Then you think that priests are bound to 
be mild and spooney ? " 



64 Modern Christianity, 

u I think they are bound to be like Christ. I 
don't know whether you would call him mild 
and spooney: I more than half suspect that you 
would. And I think, moreover, that it is in the 
highest degree dishonest to claim the posses- 
sion of gifts which are essentially spiritual, 
mysterious, and of a totally different world, and 
all the while to maintain a muscularity of 
thought and action which is purely and entirely 
heathen. Cherish your muscularity, by all 
means, — the more you preach and practise it, 
I say, the better, — but do have the simple can- 
dor to confess that you have stolen it direct 
from heathenism, and that the whole current 
of Christ's example sets absolutely the other 
way." 

"According to your ideas, then, a parson 
ought never to go into society at all. Now, I 
totally disagree with you. It would be a most 
disastrous thing for our people that we should 
refuse to meet them in friendly intercourse. 
The presence of the clergy raises at once the 
tone of secular conversation. And Christ's ex- 
ample bears me out in this ; for he not only 



a Civilized Heathenism. 65 

attended a marriage-feast, but incurred the nick- 
name of a wine-bibber, who ate and drank with 
publicans and sinners." 

"Yes," returned my friend: " those are in- 
stances, no doubt, very few and far between, in 
which Christ may be said to have sanctioned 
some approach towards convivial life ; and I am 
bound to say that you modern Christians have 
made the most of them. One hears them 
quoted everywhere. But what took Christ to 
Cana of Galilee? Why, he went there to per- 
form one of the very greatest of his mighty 
works, the immense significance of which, in 
connection with later events, I need scarcely 
point out to a clergyman. And, as for his 
dining with publicans and sinners, do you sup- 
pose he went among them to enjoy himself, or 
to preach the gospel ? And for which of these 
reasons, may I ask, da you parsons mix so 
freely with the world ? What single feature is 
there in common between his alleged con- 
viviality and yours ? Is it from his example 
that you borrow your half-hours of affable 
conversation about nothing whatever ; your 

6* 






66 Modern Christianity, 

friendly intercourse, wherein the chances of 
doing good are as one to twenty, and the 
chances of talking a vicious amount of non- 
sense are as twenty to one ; your dinner- 
parties, in the midst of which the priest is 
pleasantly supposed to stand up suddenly, to 
the consternation of his host, and rebuke ex- 
travagance and self-indulgence and frivolous 
words, but never yet was known to do any 
thing of the kind ; your archery-meetings, 
croquet-tournaments, five-o'clock teas, and other 
modes of innocent recreation, which you pat- 
ronize with the laudable intent of showing how 
possible it is to serve God and mammon, how 
easy to combine the pleasures of this world 
with those of the world to come ? And then 
you talk of raising the tone of conversation ! 
Why, my good friend, you know perfectly well 
that the parson goes into society on the very 
same footing as that on which the layman goes, 
because he is a gentleman, and it is pleasant to 
meet him. If he dared to reprove and exhort, 
or assume any priestly function, his friends 
would declare that he was not a gentleman, and 



a Civilized Heathenism. 67 

would invite him no more. His clerical duties, 
so far as they may be exercised at all, are 
strictly limited to the saying of grace before 
and after dinner. And the fashion in which 
this ceremony is performed shows plainly 
enough the amount of respect in which his office 
is held. He mutters some mysterious words, 
of which nobody takes the slightest possible 
notice ; and there his business ends. If he pre- 
sumed to keep the company waiting while he 
offered up a decently earnest prayer, he would 
stand but little chance of being asked to 
say grace again. Try the experiment yourself, 
old fellow, when next you go out to dine. 
Speak up from the fulness of your heart, as 
you contemplate the bountiful feast spread out 
before you, and thank Him in fitting language 
to whom you believe that thanks are due. No, 
no. You dare not utter a syllable which would 
hurt the prejudices of your friends. And all 
the while you call yourself the minister of 
Christ ; of Christ, who was perpetually doing the 
very thing which you will not do, — rebuking, 
irritating, offending, nay, positively insulting, 



68 Modern Christianity \ 

men with his precepts, if, by any means, — by 
gentleness or by severity, by love or by fear, 
by entreaty or by threatening, — he might drag 
them away from their deadly, damning sins, 
and win them to himself, and make them good 
and pure." 

u And yet," said I, "if you would go some- 
where and hear a course of Lenten sermons, I 
don't think you would have much cause to 
complain of our not speaking out with sufficient 
boldness and severity." 

" Sermons," repeated Curtis, — " oh, ah ! I 
have no fault to find with them. Your preach- 
ing is plain enough, and your Sunday standard 
of Christian holiness all that can be desired. 
You can afford to preach Christ, partly because, 
with the Bible in your hands, you could scarcely 
do less ; and partly because, such is your con- 
firmed unreality, it has come to be generally 
understood that the precepts of pulpit oratory 
are to be very cautiously applied. You preach 
Christ, and then you have done with him. 
When you meet your flock on week-days, you 
meet them as other men. You are just as 



a Civilized Heathenism. 69 

proud as other men, if you happen to be second 
cousin to an honorable, or on terms of intimacy 
with a lord. You are just as fond of your 
dinner as other men, and make quite as much 
fuss if the mutton is under-done. You are 
every whit as irritable as other men, and take 
offence as readily, if any one insults you. I 
have known dignitaries of the Church cut a 
man dead for six months, because he had 
offered them some trumpery affront. Christ, I 
am inclined to fancy, would have met one who 
had done him an injury, with a kindlier greeting 
than before." 

"My good friend," interrupted I, fast losing 
my temper at the man's absurd Utopianism, 
u you cannot expect impossibilities. We par- 
sons don't set up for angels. We are men of 
like passions with yourselves. All that we can 
pretend to do is to behave like Christian gen- 
tlemen, and set a good example to the world." 

" What example ? " 

" The example of Christ." 

" Just so. And Christ does not begin to be- 
come Christ in your hands at all, until you have 



70 . Modern Christianity, 

lifted him far above the region of gentlemanly 
behavior, and brought him to the point where 
he is a positive nuisance to the natural man. 
You cannot be setting the example of Christ, 
while men speak well of you, and seek your 
company, and find your tone and habits very 
much like their own. The squire, the soldier, 
the good-natured, agreeable fellow whose wine 
you drink and at whose jokes you laugh, — 
these men, unless you have already done your 
work upon them, and humbled them at the feet 
of Christ, ought to feel your presence an in- 
tolerable restraint, and toss their heads im- 
patiently at the very sound of your name. You 
ought to be besieging them, worrying them, 
literally boring them, with the vehemence of 
your entreaties that they will come out from the 
plague and pestilence, and save their souls from 
hell. But no. It is more gentlemanly to let 
them linger in their sin, and die. And haven't 
you the wit to perceive, my dear old friend, 
that, to whatever extent you abstain from open 
war against the vice and slothfulness of every 
man you meet,- to precisely the same extent you 



a Civilized Heathenism. 71 

are a mere excrescence on society ? Unless you 
are making worldly men and women hate you 
just as they hated Christ, you are simply a 
superfluous body of men. Civilization does not 
want you. The laws by which she keeps bru- 
tality in check, and brings the drunkard and the 
murderer to justice, were framed without you. 
She has police to clear her streets, and magis- 
trates to convict the vagabond and the rogue, 
and a keen sense of the honorable and the up- 
right to regulate her intercourse between man 
and man " — 

14 Which she borrowed from Christianity.' ' 

" Which she borrowed from nothing of the 
kind ; which belongs to her, on the contrary, 
as a matter of decent human feeling, and with- 
out which a man becomes a savage and a beast." 

u It did not belong to the Greeks and Romans 
before Christ came." 

" I defy you to prove it. All our relics of 
classical antiquity tell a different tale. We have 
but left the Athenian behind in manufactures 
and money-making, just as he had left the 
Israelite behind in literature and the arts of war. 



72 Modern Christianity \ 

From the Queen of Sheba to Queen Victoria, 
from Solomon to Mr. Robert Lowe, the course 
of this world has developed a steady progress 
in civilization, with which progress Christianity 
— I mean not Christian philosophy, but the 
Christianity of Christ — has had nothing what- 
ever to do. Will you presume to tell me that 
our last-acquired colony is civilized because the 
missionary landed there and spoke of Christ, 
and not because merchants sent a cargo there, 
and opened to the inhabitants the resources of a 
flourishing trade ? " 

" Look here, old fellow," interrupted I, "I 
won't sit still and hear you abusing missionaries." 

" I am not abusing missionaries. You per- 
sist in misinterpreting me. Heathen as I am, I 
could kiss the feet of any man who leaves home 
and friends, and the softnesses of life, and takes 
the cross in his hand, and becomes Christ to the 
poor and needy, whether in Polynesia, or Shore- 
ditch, or Bermondsey. But I won't admit that 
missionary work has civilized the world. My 
dear fellow, where have your clergy worked 
the harder, — in Whitechapel, or in Grosvenor 
Square ? " 



a 'Civilized Heathenism. 73 

u In Whitechapel, I should suppose." 
u And which place is the more civilized of the 
two ? Why, if Christianity has any thing to do 
with Christ at all, civilization must ever be its 
deadliest foe. The two forces labor in totally 
different fields. Christianity wins souls for 
heaven : civilization wins prosperity for men on 
earth. Christianity works for the glory of God : 
civilization does not pretend to take any such 
object into account, but simply works for the 
glorification of human talent, and the success 
of human enterprise. Instead of marching 
hand in hand, as the cant of the day would 
represent, they ought to be fighting tooth and 
nail; and the fact that they have ceased to 
fight proves that one or the other of them has 
given in. I had the curiosity, not long ago, to 
attend one of your monster festivals of the 
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, at 
which some learned bishop was the appointed 
preacher. 4 Think, my brethren,' said the 
excellent man, — c think how the words of our 
Master have been fulfilled! See how, in every 
corner of the globe, on the boundless continent, 
7 



74 Modern Christianity, 

and among the islands of the mighty ocean, the 
Christian Church has made its way ! To all the 
nations of the earth the glad tidings have gone 
forth; and Europe, Asia, Africa, and America 
have owned the dominion of Christ.' I thought 
I had never heard such a piece of cool imperti- 
nence in all my life. Why, it is the English 
merchantman, and not the missionary, that has 
subdued the nations of the earth. The mission- 
ary — all honor to him ! — has made a handful of 
converts at Graham's Town or Madagascar, just 
as he has made a handful at Haggerstone or the 
London Docks ; but the reason why vast con- 
tinents and colonies profess the British faith is 
because they are under the government of the 
British crown. Your modern Christianity has 
denied Christ, repudiated as obsolete more than 
half his distinctive teaching, declared his exam- 
ple to be antiquated and unsuited to modern 
times, grown ashamed of his social rank, and 
calmly assumed, without one scrap of authority, 
that his weary, drooping, threadbare figure is 
fitly represented by the well-fed rector, the 
pompous, self-important dignitary, and the 






a Civilized Heathenism. 75 

croquet-playing, clog-cart-driving curate, of a 
polished generation, — your Church, I say, has 
done all this ; and then it has the unblushing 
impudence to claim the spread of civilization, 
and the triumphs of man's industry and genius, 
as the fruits of its own labor in Christ's 
name ! " 

11 Of course they are the fruits of its own 
labor. Christianity has left its mark over all the 
world. Every art, every science, every social 
pursuit of man, has become impregnated with 
it ; and it is simply foolish to take your stand 
outside the system, as if you were indebted to 
it for nothing. You cannot so much as date a 
letter, without tacitly admitting your belief in 
the birth of Christ." 

" Quite so. And I may just as well say that 
you cannot look up at the stars, without tacitly 
admitting your belief in Mars and Venus ; or 
that you cannot name the days of the week, 
without tacitly acknowledging a host of Saxon 
deities. No doubt, Christianity has left its mark 
over all the world; and so has heathenism. 
There never was a philosophy yet, which did 



j6 Modern Christianity, 

not leave its mark; and the teaching of Christ, 
the best of all philosophies, has left more per- 
manent marks than any. No educated heathen 
would hesitate to confess how much society 
owes to the civilizing effects of Christianity. 
But you will not have it so. You say that 
Christ was not a civilizer. You say that he was 
God ; and that, so far from coming to make 
this world pleasant and polite, he came to 
demonstrate the utter worthlessness of all things 
therein ; that, so far from ministering to human 
progress, he taught that the more men learn, 
and the more they labor, and the more they 
get, the farther do they go astray from him, and 
the weaker does their hope become of everlast- 
ing life hereafter. This is your doctrine ; and 
I say that, having chosen it, you ought to abide 
by it. My complaint against you is, that you 
only use it when it happens to be convenient, 
and at all sther times are content to put up 
with heathenism. When you are preaching a 
sermon, or saying your prayers, or talking about 
missionary work, or l shutting up ' a sceptic, you 
take the loftiest possible ground, and discourse 



a Civilized Heathenism. 77 

of miracles, and spiritual agencies, and the 
marvellous death and resurrection of Christ, and 
the eternal joys of heaven, or flames of hell ; 
but when we turn your own words upon you, 
and suggest that such extraordinary beliefs 
involve extraordinary lives, you back out of 
your Christianity at once, as regards its super- 
natural features, and stand upon it only as upon 
a very good philosophy; which is what we 
admitted it to be all along. We heathen are 
content to be honest and truthful and kind and 
courteous and moral. You Christians come to 
us, and say that this is not enough, but that, in 
addition to all this, we must follow Christ. We 
strongly object to follow him, because we are 
not prepared to renounce this agreeable world, 
and to be hated and laughed at for our eccentri- 
cities, as he was: so we decline. Whereupon, 
you call us unbelievers and atheists, and all 
sorts of -names; while you yourselves object to 
follow Christ precisely as much as we do, and 
from precisely the same cause. I call this dis- 
honest and illogical. Having made choice of an 

unearthly Guide, you should be content to follow 

7* 



78 Modern Christianity, 

him along unearthly paths ; and if, in following 
him, you find yourselves committed to a life 
which ordinary people regard as the life of a 
lunatic, you should put up with the inconven- 
ience of being considered lunatics so long as 
you continue in this lower world, and look for- 
ward to getting credit for being in ydtir right 
senses when you reach a better world above. 
But this does not suit you. You claim the priv- 
ilege of doing exactly as we do all the week, 
and keep ' your mystical beliefs to hurl at our 
heads on Sunday." 

u My dear fellow," answered I, u your argu- 
ment comes round and round to the same thing 
again and again, and simply amounts to this, — 
that the Christian, like any other man, is of 
necessity inconsistent." 

u Pardon me," replied he : " inconsistency has 
nothing to do with the matter. Inconsistency 
implies that a man makes some sort of effort to 
do what he thinks right, and fails, and tries 
again. My point is, that you make, and profess 
to make, no effort of any kind. I should call 
it an inconsistency, if, having admitted that the 



a Civilized Heathenism. 79 

imitation of Christ forbade your enjoyment of 
earthly pleasures, you were seen, once in a way, 
at Newmarket or Evans's. But I cannot call it 
an inconsistency that there should be nothing 
whatever in your present religious code to 
prevent, let us say, the Christian, the man who 
denies that Christ ever lived, and the man who 
never by any chance offers up a prayer, from 
being associated together on equal terms in 
business, in pleasure, in every conceivable rela- 
tion of life, in such a way as to make it simply 
impossible, unless . you watch their pursuits on 
Sunday, to tell which is which. I cannot call 
it an inconsistency that all Christian England 
should wink at idolatry, the distinctive sin of 
ancient heathenism, and the greatest of all 
abominations in the sight of God, and should 
systematically teach young boys a mass of lies 
and folly about gods and goddesses who never 
lived, because the Alcestis or the Iliad is better 
Greek than Chrvsostom on St. Matthew. I 
cannot call it an inconsistency that Christian 
sculptors should not care two straws, so long as 
they can get an order, whether they set to work 



80 Modern Christianity, 

upon an infant Bacchus or an infant Christ. I 
call these things deliberate abandonments of 
principle ; and they are beautifully characteristic, 
of your entire modern Christianity. If you 
really believed a whole roomful of worldly- 
minded people to be threatened with unquench- 
able fire, it would be impossible for you to help 
betraying your belief; for you could never open 
your mouth to speak to them on any other 
subject than the ' frightful peril in which they 
lay. And, if you really believed in Christ as 
any thing better than a wise instructor, you 
would burn every mythological book, and break 
in pieces every mythological statue, and call 
your glorious stars, which speak to you so elo- 
quently of the great Creator's power, by some 
better names than the names of fabulous absur- 
dities, whose very remembrance is an insult to 
the majesty of God." 

" Really, Curtis," said I, " you talk like some 
old woman." 

" Nay," answered he, " these sentiments are 
none of mine. I don't talk like an old woman. 
But you ought to talk like one ; and because 



a Civilized Heathenism. 81 

you are ashamed to be heard talking like one, 
and dread, above all things, that the world 
should taunt you with old womanish ideas, you 
have dropped out of your theology whatever 
grates against common-sense, and appear in- 
offensively before society as a civilized heathen. 
What I cannot get you to understand is, that 
in so doing, in this futile attempt of yours 
to represent as manly and muscular a system 
which is essentially meek and mild, you have 
abandoned the distinctive principle of your 
faith, and given up the whole point between 
the world and Christ, and have turned a king- 
dom of mysteries into a school of morals ; in 
which school, you clergy, having abjured the 
peculiarities of your weary, sorrow-stricken 
Master, have become the mere professors of a 
good and sound philosophy, — the philosophy 
of common-sense in business, and gentlemanly 
conduct in society ; but I don't know that we 
particularly need your services, because any 
intelligent, honorable layman can teach such a 
philosophy equally well. A national church is 
a very expensive article ; and unless you have 



82 Modern Christianity, 

something better to tell us than we can learn 
any day at luncheon, from the lawyer or the 
squire, it is high time that you should retire 
from clerical life, and earn your bread else- 
where. Men are pleased to call you Reverend ; 
but, if such a title belongs to any profession on 
this earth, it belongs not to the parson, but to 
the doctor. He it is, who, in some degree at 
least, is making himself Christ to the suffering 
and the sorrowing among mankind. He it is 
who turns out of his bed at midnight to cool 
the poor man's burning lips, or succor a 
woman with the tenderest efforts of his skill, 
who can never pay him sixpence for his trouble, 
whether her infant lives or dies." 

" I am sure I hope that I should go and visit 
any one who sent for me, just as readily as the 
doctor does." 

" I have not a doubt of it ; only, what you 
would do cheerfully enough once in a way, he 
does as a matter of business all day long. Your 
work is baby's play compared with his ; and I 
really don't know what class of society would 
be very much the worse, if the entire fifteen or 



a Civilized Heathenism. 83 

twenty thousand of you were swept off the 
face of the earth to-morrow. We don't want 
you, my friend, indeed, we don't, if you are 
only going to help us, in some infinitesimal 
degree, to become more civilized and polite 
and human. Be Christ to us, and at any rate 
we shall understand you. We may laugh at 
you, and call you enthusiasts, and decline to 
become sharers of your unattractive life ; but 
we shall reject your teaching at our own risk : 
the consequences, if consequences there be, will 
fall upon ourselves; and, at the very least, 
we shall understand you. We cannot under- 
stand you now. We have not the faintest no- 
tion what it is that you want us to do. Your 
sermons tell us of one sort of Christ, and your 
conversation of another. In your gospel we 
see a Christ bruised, and covered with reproach, 
and laughed to scorn : in your daily life we see 
a Christ who has grown ashamed of his poverty 
and low estate, has cast off the garb of the Man 
of sorrows, and has become a courteous gentle- 
man, or a shrewd business-like man of the 
world. And, because we see these things, we 



84 Modern Christianity, 

don't believe in any Christ at all. Yon are 
fond of preaching about the spirit of modern 
infidelity, and love to flatter yourselves that 
some half a dozen rationalistic Germans are re- 
sponsible for all the scepticism of the day. Let 
me tell you that the un- Christ-like priest is the 
truest source of infidelity. The free discussion 
of theological difficulties could shake no one's 
faith, if the witness of the clergy to the truth 
of their own gospel were such as any reasonable 
man could entertain. Why should I believe, 
when, as far as my powers of penetration are 
able to assist me, I can see that you yourselves 
are only half persuaded to be Christians ? y 

" I am afraid, my dear fellow," answered I, 
" that such an excuse will not help you. God 
will call you to account for your unbelief, 
whether we preach faithfully or no. You have 
your Bible " — 

" The Bible is of no use without an inter- 
preter. If a Bible could be picked up some- 
where among the ' islands of the mighty ocean,' 
do you suppose that the poor benighted heathen 
would understand a word of it ? The Bible 



a Civilized Heathenism. 85 

lays down injunctions which no Christian man 
or woman of my acquaintance pretends to fulfil ; 
and, when T ask for an explanation of such a 
peculiar fact, you mystify me to that extent 
that I don't know where I am. You tell me 
that one-half, at least, of the express commands 
of Christ were not intended to be literally 
obeyed ; and that when he said to one who 
would devote himself to his service, c Sell that 
thou hast, and give to the poor, and take up 
thy cross and follow me,' he meant to say, ' Buy 
through some clerical agent the advowson of 
a fat rectory within an easy distance of town, 
look out for some nice young lady with a little 
money of her own, and make yourself thorough- 
ly comfortable.' " 

11 Stay," said I, " you have hit upon an ac- 
knowledged abuse. Most of us condemn traffic 
in church-patronage as a scandal." 

" Then, why don't your bishops dare to set 
to work and stop it ? Why don't they boldly 
refuse to institute any man who has bought 
himself a living, and take the consequences ? 
It would not do, would it ? Why, they would 



86 Modern Christianity, 

gain at once the character of cantankerous, 
unsafe men, and lose their chance of that golden 
prize of vapid, stagnant moderation, — the see 
of C ." 

" I had hoped, my dear Curtis, that you 
were too generous-hearted to impute unworthy 
motives, even to an adversary." 

" Then, I beg to retract my words ; and I take 
refuge in the only alternative left to me. Since 
your stern, single-minded prelates witness per- 
petually the transactions of which I speak, and 
do not interfere with them, I will assume that 
they see little in them to disapprove ; that they 
have tacitly accepted the modern Christian 
theory, that the priesthood is a mere secular 
profession, in which a capitalist may invest his 
money, and look for profitable returns ; and that 
the priest is a doctor of morals, just as other 
men are doctors of physic or of law." 

" Perhaps," answered I, " our bishops think 
the practice a necessary evil ; and, really, I do 
not see how it can be avoided. It makes very 
little difference, as far as I can judge, whether 
a man gets his father to buy him a living, or 
asks his friend to give him one." 



a Civilized Heathenism. 87 

11 Very little difference indeed. The whole 
system under which rectories and canonries 
are treated as comfortable sources of income is 
purely and exclusively heathen." 

" And yet our Lord himself allows that the 
laborer is worthy of his hire." 

" Of how much hire ? Why, of that amount 
exactly which is needful for his support while 
laboring, and of nothing further. Here is 
another of the texts which you perpetually have 
the impudence to misquote, as an apology for 
clerical self-indulgence. It so happens that the 
words tell expressly against you. Christ was 
bidding his ministers go forth without purse or 
scrip or shoes, in a state of such utter poverty, 
that they were forced to live on the hospitality 
of their converts ; and this, the bare food and 
lodging offered them, is what he permits them 
to accept as their legitimate reward. My dear 
friend, so long as you parsons twist about the 
words of Scripture after such a fashion as this, 
you can hardly wonder that a heathen like 
myself should decline to receive the Bible as 
a trustworthy witness of God." 



88 Modern Christianity, 

" But there are other witnesses. Does not 
your own conscience tell you, every time you 
do any thing, wrong, that there is a God who 
will sooner or later punish you ? " 

" Certainly not. Your conscience tells you 
so, probably enough, because you have drunk 
in the belief with every breath of childhood, 
and learned it by heart upon your mother's lap. 
You are making some slight confusion, my 
friend, between conscience and deeply-rooted 
prejudice. I thoroughly believe in Nemesis, if 
that is what you mean. If I take too much 
sherry at night, I shall have a headache in the 
morning ; and if I play a mean trick upon my 
neighbor, or cheat at cards, I shall have the 
satisfaction of remembering, for the rest of my 
life, that I have acted like a blackguard. All 
heathen believe in Nemesis, and some of them 
have canonized her as a deity; but such a 
belief has not much in common with your idea 
of God." 

" Who do you suppose made the world ? " I 
inquired, flattering myself that I had puzzled 
him at last. 



a Civilized Heathenism. 89 

" I am sure I don't know," answered he. " I 
should imagine that it came into existence by 
some mysterious law of generation, just as I 
came into existence myself. I am not bound to 
believe that the hands of any personal creator 
fashioned it, any more than I believe that the 
hands of any personal creator fashioned me." 

" Then you really think it more reasonable to 
suppose that the sun and moon and stars got 
into their appointed places by chance, than that 
they were created, and are continually kept in 
check, by some almighty power ? " 

" I don't say that they came by chance. I 
presume that they were developed out of mat- 
ter ; and matter, like the principle of genera- 
tion, is, of course, eternal." 

" How can matter be eternal? Somebody 
must have made it." 

" And how can somebody be eternal ? Some- 
body else must have made him. My dear fellow, 
there are heaps of marvellous things in nature, 
which must needs be accepted, whether we will 
or no ; but this much is certain, that, if you 
come to talk of reason, the most unreasonable 

8* 



90 Modern Christianity, 

belief of all is, that the world we see around us 
is the work of a personal and living God. Nay, 
it is precisely twice as difficult to believe that 
God made Nature, as to believe that Nature 
made herself: because, if Nature be final and 
supreme, you have one great mystery to perplex 
you ; but if God made Nature out of nothing, 
when you have duly contemplated an effort so 
extraordinary, you must face the further prob- 
lem, whence came God. The orthodox argu- 
ment on this point is peculiar. You are 
forbidden to suppose, as a thing supremely 
ridiculous, that Nature herself is eternal, because 
so wonderful a piece of mechanism as the uni- 
verse bears the manifest impress of an almighty 
hand. And yet you are not only permitted to 
hold, but are enjoined to believe steadfastly, on 
peril of damnation for evermore, that the al- 
mighty hand itself bears no impress whatever ; 
that a Being many thousand times more won- 
derful than earth and sun and stars, inasmuch as 
he created them by the breath of his mouth, 
never had any beginning at all. Why it should 
be irrational to believe in the eternity of a 



a Civilized Heathenism. 



91 



substance, and not irrational to believe in the 
eternity of a person, one does not precisely 
^understand. Give me some decently plausible 
evidence, and I will do my best to become 
convinced; but you can hardly expect me to 
believe in a God whom nobody has ever seen, 
who lives nobody can tell where, and is doing 
nobody knows what, simply because you show 
me the sun in heaven, and ask me how it got 
there. God himself has never asked any man 
to believe on evidence so absurd. Admitting 
your Bible to be true, I find him indeed appeal- 
ing to the works of his creation as tokens of his 
power, but only doing so when he would con- 
firm the wavering faith of those who already, in 
some degree, acknowledged him. It is one 
thing for a Christian or a Jew to worship with 
increased fervor when he contemplates the 
works of God : it is quite another thing for a 
heathen to evolve for himself the conception of 
a creator, because he does not know how else 
creation came. That witness of himself which 
God offered to the nations, when he sent them 
fruitful seasons, filling their hearts with food and 



92 Modern Christianity, 

gladness, — this r as St. Paul confesses, was so 
palpably insufficient, that it became necessary 
to adopt some other way. So far, indeed, from 
expecting man to find him out by observing the 
ordinary course of Nature, the Almighty took 
special care, whenever he desired to make him- 
self known, to upset the ordinary course of 
Nature, and work a miracle. From the burning 
bush and the plagues of Egypt, down to the 
draught of fishes a hundred and fifty and three, 
your Bible is a continuous record of events 
wherein God proved himself to be divine, by 
superseding the operations of the visible world. 
Such testimony could not fail to convince all 
but the wilfully obstinate and rebellious ; and I, 
not being obstinate or rebellious, shall be only 
too happy to own myself . con vinced, if I may 
be shown such testimony now." 

" Such testimony cannot be shown now. The 
age of miracles is passed." 

" Excuse me," replied Curtis, " if I say that 
that sounds very suspiciously like a shuffle. If 
miracles are the accepted evidence of God's 
power, they must needs be repeated whenever 



a Civilized Heathenism. 93 

God's power is called in question. And it is 
called in question at the present day. ' There 
never was a time,' according to your favorite 
burst of pulpit eloquence, c when infidelity 
made such rapid strides.' Well, then, show us 
wicked infidels a miracle. Let us see Nebu- 
chadnezzar turned into an ox, or hear a dumb 
animal talking to its rider, or " — 

" My dear fellow, I tell you that the Almighty 
does not see fit to work miracles now." 

11 And why ? Because pjeople are a little too 
sharp to be taken in by them ? Because the 
special correspondent or the policeman would 
be one too many on the scene ? My good 
friend, it is of the very essence of a miracle, as 
evidence, that men should see it. It is of no 
use second-hand. A miracle that you hear of, 
but did not see, becomes at once a myth. Your 
scripture stories about Joshua's sun and moon, 
or the passage of the Israelites through the 
water, are in themselves not one atom less ridi- 
culous to posterity than the classical fables 
about Zeus and Aphrodite. Let those who saw 
them believe in them. You clever Christian 



94 Modern Christianity^ 

folk must take us heathen for a pack of fools. 
You tell us of some outrageously incredible 
events, which took place at a highly convenient 
distance off, in the very backwoods of history, 
and under circumstances which it is simply im- 
possible to investigate ; and when we modestly 
shake our heads, and ask for a repetition of the 
marvel, you coolly dismiss us with the answer, 
that, in this enlightened age, a miracle could not 
be performed." 

" A miracle could be performed easily enough, 
if God willed it. But such a method of proof has 
become unnecessary : God has revealed himself 
.in these last days by his Son." 

" Precisely so. Now we shall understand each 
other. He has revealed himself by his Son. 
Nature, as a primary instructor, tells me nothing 
about God whatever. Forced, in any case, to 
accept the world around me as a mystery, I find 
the supposition that creation made itself to be 
the least unfathomable mystery of all. The 
Bible, as a primary instructor, tells me nothing 
about God whatever. For all I know, its chron- 
icles may be Hebrew myths, its prophecies writ- 



I 



a Civilized Heathenism. 95 

ten to order, ex post facto, by some clever Jew, 
and its New Testament the code of morals of an 
elaborate and impudent superstition. Let those 
for whom such evidence was produced accept it, 
if they please ; for myself, it is Christ, and 
only Christ, who can tell me any thing about God 
which I care to know. If the age of miracles 
has ceased, it must be because the age of per- 
sonal witness has begun. Never yet was man 
asked to believe in a supernatural God, without 
evidence supernatural. This is the evidence 
which I demand, and which, look where I will, I 
cannot get. Show me Christ, and he shall be 
my testimony about God. Why cannot you pro- 
duce him ? If ever he came on earth, he must be 
here. If he has gone away from you, and left 
his people all alone, the age of miracles must 
needs begin again, or men will rightly disbelieve. 
The modern Christian talks of belief in God, as 
if it were the easiest thing on earth. Why, it is 
the very highest effort of the human mind. It 
involves a struggle between faith and reason, 
whose intensity can only be measured by the 
magnitude of the truths embraced. The unseen 



g6 Modern Christianity^ 

and the infinite baffle me, bewilder me, distract 
me : only by some infallible proof can I be per- 
suaded of their reality. Such proof I should 
discover in the working of a miracle before my 
eyes. You tell me that I cannot have such 
proof. Then I will have personal witness. I 
will have that testimony by which miracles in 
the physical world were superseded, when, in the 
spiritual world (if there be a spiritual world) 
God proclaimed a kingdom whose life and 
progress should be the mightiest miracle of all, 
— the kingdom of Christ in the hearts of men. 
I won't be put off with a reference to some 
historical book, which may or may not be true. 
I won't be put off by being asked to explain 
how the trees yield their fruit, or the earth goes 
round. The Bible may do much to confirm my 
faith when I have once confessed it; and the 
study of Nature may kindle my gratitude and 
raise my heart towards Him whom I have once 
brought myself to worship as the maker of all 
the worlds. But, in a matter of such over- 
whelming import, I choose, in the first instance, 
to have testimony which cannot be denied. If 



a Civilized Heathenism. 97 

I am to believe in God, it must be because I see 
him in Christ : if I am to believe in Christ, it 
must be because I see him in Ignatius, in Augus- 
tine, in Bernard of Clairvaux; because there 
are men and women living on this earth, on 
whom he has left his mark so visibly, that it can- 
not be mistaken, — men and women as firmly 
persuaded of his death upon the cross, as if their 
own eyes had seen him die. And what do you 
think must be the life and conversation of one 
who has seen him die; who knows, moreover, 
as your sermons teach us, that his own sins, 
his own wilful indulgence of appetite or desire, 
were the sins which put his Saviour to death ; 
who is conscious, at every moment of the day, 
that he himself is verily guilty of the mur- 
der of his God ? Don't be shocked, dear fellow, 
if my language is plain and strong. I am but 
showing you the legitimate issue of your own 
doctrine. You gentlemen like to have the 
theology all to yourselves, so that you may 
stop short whenever you approach dangerous 
ground, and refrain from pushing an awkward 
truth to its natural conclusion. Permit a simple- 



98 Modern Christianity^ 

minded layman to drive the argument home, 
and force you for once to abide by the results 
of your pulpit-teaching. I say, then, that every 
Christian man or woman who has ever sinned 
has with his own hand slain his God. If the 
death of Christ does not literally amount to this, 
it is a sentiment, a stage-rehearsal, a sham. You 
killed him, I killed him, every light-hearted, 
jovial English gentleman killed him; or else 
his crucifixion is a myth. Now, I ask you to 
tell me honestly whether your life, or the life of 
one Christian in ten thousand, is the life of a 
man whose mind is burdened with such a crime. 
Did you, or did you not, crucify Christ? r 

" My dear Curtis, you put things in such a 
shocking way, that I hardly know what answer 
to give you." 

" All the same I will trouble you to give me 



one." 



"Well, I suppose, if it comes to that, I did 
crucify him." 

" And yet you can sit there, and smoke your 
pipe, and drink your soda and brandy ; and go 
to bed, and sleep as calmly as a child ; and wake 



a Civilized Heathenism. 99 

in the morning, and enjoy your life as merrily as 
if you had never hurt a fly." 

u To be sure I can. What is the use of mop- 
ing? I can't help having crucified Christ; and 
I sha'n't undo any harm that I have done, by 
making myself miserable and glum." 

" It is not a question of undoing harm: it is 
a question of manifesting a commonly decent 
sorrow for the commission of a most atrocious 
deed." 

" But, my dear fellow, you exaggerate things 
so frightfully ! I cannot exactly feel that I am 
personally responsible for the atrocious deed. 
It took place by some mysterious dispensation 
of the will of God." 

" In other words, it was a theatrical effect, a 
dissolving- view, a nursery-tale, c got up ' as an 
appeal to your better feelings, in the hope of 
making your life more moral and correct. Now, 
don't let us have any unreality in the matter. 
Is sin, or is it not, truly and literally the occa- 
sion of Christ's death ? " 

11 Of course it is." 

" Then Christ's death is the exact measure of 



ioo Modern Christianity, 



the guilt of sin ; and yet you can sin, and be 
merry. Nay, there is something more to be 
said about it than this. Pray, what is the punr 
ishment of sin? " 

"Hell." 

" And hell means everlasting torment in 
unquenchable fire ? " 

u Yes, undoubtedly." 

" Then sin is not only the measure of the 
guilt incurred by Christ's death, but it is the 
measure of the sinner's agony in hell; which 
agony, you say, is everlasting. And yet you 
can sin, and be merry. I suppose," continued 
Curtis, u that you really do believe in hell." 

" Certainly I do." 

"And you think that most people will go 
there?" 

u Indeed I do not think any thing so dread- 
ful." 

" Come now, old fellow, let us have the cour- 
age and the honesty to look our difficulties in 
the face. You have every reason to believe, 
have you not, from a comparison of scripture 
and Christian teaching with the general condi- 



a Civilized Heathenism. 101 

tion of the world, that only a small proportion 
of mankind will eventually be saved ? ' : 

" Yes," I answered, after some little hesita- 
tion : "I am afraid that I am bound to think so." 

" Then will you kindly explain to me how it 
comes to pass that you can soberly believe, and 
eloquently preach, that an overwhelming major- 
ity of your fellow-creatures will be burnt alive 
throughout all eternity in the flames of hell, and 
yet can find time or inclination at any moment 
of your life for any other work than the work 
of rescuing the souls around you from their 
appalling doom ? " 

"I never said any thing about being burnt 
alive. Your way of putting things, my dear 
friend, is perfectly horrible." 

"I wish it to be perfectly horrible. Hell, I 
presume, is intended to be perfectly horrible. 
I would speak of it in words a hundred-fold 
more horrible, if only I knew how. Pray, if 
the everlasting torment, in unquenchable flames, 
of an immortal soul, does not mean being burnt 
alive forever, what does it mean? Moreover, 
I should imagine that you are not quite certain 

9* 



102 Modern Christianity ', 

that you will escape the punishment of hell 
yourself." 

" Ah, no ! " said I : " indeed I am not." 

" And you can contemplate even so much as 
the distant possibility of being tortured with 
agonies insupportable for ages and ages, and 
millions of ages more, and all the while can 
laugh and joke, and talk of politics and business 
and pleasure, as if you were the happiest fellow 
on this earth ! " 

" My dear Curtis, I cannot always be thinking 
about hell. I think of it sometimes, of course ; 
and when I do so the contemplation makes me 
very sad." 

u Very sad! I should think it did. And it 
is only sometimes, I take it, that the majority of 
your brethren think of it ; for I cannot say that 
they strike me, on the whole, as a particularly 
sad-looking set of men. Now, let us put the 
matter logically and fairly. This most frightful 
doctrine of an everlasting fire is literally true, or 
literally false. There is no intelligible theory 
between the two extremes. A subject of such 
gigantic importance refuses to accommodate it- 



a Civilized Heathenism. 103 

self to the dimensions of a commonplace contin- 
gency. You parsons do actually stand in immi- 
nent peril of being burnt alive forever, or else 
you do not. The souls committed to your keep- 
ing, or a certain proportion of them, are destined 
to spend a whole eternity in torment, or they 
are destined to nothing of the kind. If they 
are so destined, and if you, unless by precept 
and- example you have done all in your power 
to save them, shall have your part in their unut- 
terable woe, what can you do from morning to 
night but pray for them, and weep for them, 
and implore them earnestly to escape at any 
cost from the horrors of an unquenchable flame ? 
Obviously there is nothing else that you can do ; 
and, if at any instant you put your hands to any 
other work, nobody to whom you preach will 
suppose that you really believe in the terrors 
which you threaten." 

"I don't see that at all," answered I. "May 
not a priest hold his doctrines fast, and yet for a 
time forget them? Nay, may he not even com- 
mit wilful sin, and all the while be fully per- 
suaded that he shall suffer for it at the last ? ' 



104 Modern Christianity, 

u No doubt he may. But I do not happen to 
be speaking of wilful sin, or weaknesses of the 
flesh, or inconsistencies of conduct either. Of 
course, a thoroughly religious man may yield to 
temptation again and again, and yet may have 
a clear conviction that God's eye is watching 
him, and that God's law will bring him to judg- 
ment The Christian priest, no less than the 
Christian layman, must be continually beset by 
the allurements of the world. This is another 
matter altogether. Heathen as I am, I trust 
that I shall never so far forget myself as to talk 
to a clerical friend about his private sins. I am 
talking of your visible, external, premeditated 
mode of life. My point is this, — that in the 
face of your alleged persuasion that you your- 
self and all your flock are standing, for all you 
know, upon the very brink of an everlasting 
hell, you have deliberately chosen, and cheer- 
fully maintain, a course of occupations, and a 
position in society, which no man could possibly 
endure for half a day, who really believed him- 
self and those dear to him to be placed in any 
such peril. I do not pretend that you are lead- 



a Civilized Heathenism. 105 

ing a godless life. What I say is, that, if you 
are not leading a downright ascetic life, — the 
life of Christ, and nothing less, — you waste 
words upon the air when you preach the punish- 
ment of eternal flames." 

"It never was intended," I replied, begin- 
ning to unwire the cork of another bottle of 
soda-water, — "it never was intended that I 
should lead an ascetic life ; and I could not do it 
if I tried." 

" Then you must give up your doctrine. No 
other life has any sense whatever, when a man 
comes to talk' about being burnt alive in an 
unquenchable fire. Do let us strip these words 
of their conventional c unmeaningness,' let us 
clear away the rust which the traditions of un- 
thinking ages have fastened on them, and let us 
think what they really signify. To be burnt 
alive in an unquenchable fire, — it is literally 
this, and worse than this, or else it is nothing. 
Whether the fire be spiritual or material, 
whether the pain be mental or bodily, the idea 
presented to the mind is always the same. The 
lost are to dwell forever amid such excruciating 



106 Modern Chris tianity^ 

torment, that they shall curse the day when 
they came into the world. Could you, could I, 
could any one of us, believing it to be, let us 
only say, uncertain, whether this horrible doom 
will be our own doom or not, take thought for 
any conceivable thing besides ? What do I care 
whether I live in a house, or a cellar; whether 
my business fails, or prospers ; whether the world 
goes on, or collapses altogether ? — what are all 
these things to me, and what are thousands of 
other such things to me, if this life is to last me 
for thirty, forty, fifty years, and then, unless 
all my hours and minutes have been given to 
God, this very body of mine in which I live and 
move is to be burnt forevermore? These 
things could be absolutely nothing to me. At 
no single instant could I dare to relax my vigi- 
lance, lest some unforeseen temptation should 
insnare me in the toils of hell. The ascetic life 
might cost me a superhuman struggle ; to weep 
and pray incessantly might seem a hard and 
cheerless lot : but, if utter prostration of myself 
before God were the price at which I was to 
escape being damned, I would pay the price un- 



a' Civilized Heathenism. 107 

grudgingly with the few short years of this pal- 
try life, and take my reward hereafter." 

u But, my good fellow, you forget that both 
you and I have certain duties to perform, with 
which the ascetic life is incompatible." 

" What duties ? If they be such duties as will 
prevent my keeping perpetually before me the 
dread of hell, I shall decline to attempt them." 

"It unfortunately happens," I replied, "to be 
your special business not only to attempt a 
variety of secular duties, but satisfactorily to 
fulfil them; and, what is more, God will call 
you to account for your negligence if you leave 
them undone." 

"Will he? Then he has bidden me do things 
contradictory to one another: he has reduced 
religion to an absurdity, and as such I shall re- 
ject it. I cannot serve him, and not serve him ; 
think of him, and not think of him ; remember 
the penalty of hell, and forget it, in order that 
I may fix my mind with earnestness on some- 
thing which merely concerns this lower world. 
Besides, in a matter of such moment, I choose 
to be <on the safe side. God may or may not 



108 Modern Christianity, 

have laid upon me some purely secular task; 
I cannot tell: but I can tell, supposing your 
gospel to be true, that he has threatened me 
with eternal fire. He will not damn me, because, 
through fear of his awful judgments, I make my 
whole life a life of incessant prayer. My des- 
tiny for ages and ages to come is of such over- 
whelming importance to me, that nothing else is 
worth considering. No plausible suggestions 
that duty summons me elsewhere, no subtle 
hints that I have duties to discharge in this or 
that society, shall turn me a hair's-breadth from 
the one purpose of my life. Stretched out in 
the distance before me, I see the everlasting 
hell ; and he who comes to me with whisperings 
that would divert my gaze towards something 
else shall be to me a tempter from the Evil 
One." 

"Well," said I, "on some few men of a 
specially sensitive turn of mind, the fear of hell 
might possibly operate in the way which you 
describe. But it is lucky that most persons are 
not similarly affected : if they were, the world 
could not go on." • 



d Civilized Heathenism. 109 

11 The old argument back again. I thought 
we had disposed of that objection long ago. 
And suppose the world did not go on ? Admit- 
ting the orthodox belief about heaven and hell, 
what possible harm could happen to any living 
soul, if all mankind agreed to leave trade and 
politics alone, and kneel before God with prayer 
and weeping till the judgment-day? " 

"If mankind agreed to any thing so foolish, 
mankind would be simply thwarting the express 
designs of the Almighty. When the Creator 
made* this earth, he meant that its resources 
should be utilized ; and when he made man 
supreme over his other works, and gave him a 
quick intelligence and a cunning hand, he meant 
that these gifts should be employed " — 

" To what purpose, may I ask ? " 

"Indirectly, to the glory of God, but osten- 
sibly and practically, no doubt, to the advance- 
ment and prosperity of man." 

" I am to gather, then, that man was sent upon 
this earth in order that he might work out his 
own advancement and prosperity ? " 

"I did not say so," answered I. "I should 
10 



no Modern Christianity \ 

rather imagine that he was sent on earth to work 
out the salvation of his soul." 

" And upon what theory is it proposed that 
the attainment of two such very distinct objects 
should be combined, — that man should work 
for temporal advancement and spiritual welfare 
at one and the same time ? " 

" Upon this very simple theory, which Scrip- 
ture and common-sense alike suggest as the only 
theory that can stand. A man must choose an 
honest calling ; must labor diligently in fulfilling 
its duties ; must be temperate in his habits, 
moderate in his pleasures, and chaste in his 
behavior ; must love his neighbor as himself ; 
must say his prayers night and morning, go to 
church on Sunday, and do his best to follow the 
prayers, and profit by the sermon. If he does 
this, and does it from a good motive, because he 
knows that he is thereby pleasing God, he will 
have solved the problem how to combine the 
attainment of temporal advancement with spirit- 
ual welfare ; and, when he dies, God will take 
him to heaven." 

" Should he, unhappily, fail in solving this 
apparently not very difficult problem ? ' 



a Civilized Heathenism. 1 1 1 

u Why, in that case," said I, u when he dies, 
he will go to hell." 

" And you positively mean me to accept it 
as your belief, — the belief of an intellectual, 
educated man, — that success in the life of which 
you have just drawn a picture can possibly win 
heaven, or that failure in such a life can possibly 
merit hell ? My dear fellow, you must perceive 
at once that both your reward and your punish- 
ment are out of all proportion to the amount of 
service rendered or withheld. The average life 
of the average exemplary layman, who gives 
most of his time to business, a fair proportion 
of it to pleasure, and a decent scrap of it to 
God, could neither entitle any man to the 
eternal blessedness of heaven, nor make him fit 
to appreciate its joys. Such a life might, indeed, 
be a suitable preparation for some future state 
of existence, in which loftier flights of commer- 
cial enterprise might be attempted, or nobler 
triumphs of mechanical skill might be achieved ; 
but such a life could never lead up to pleasures 
in which angels take delight, or discover amid 
the throng of ransomed saints the haven where 
it would be." 



112 Modern Christianity \ 

u You must remember," I observed, u that 
our ideas of heaven are purely conventional and 
imaginary. We talk to children about white- 
robed martyrs singing the praise of God, because 
such a thought conveys a beautiful and appro- 
priate picture to their childish minds. But it is 
far more probable that heaven will hereafter 
prove to be a state of existence wherein our 
occupations will be something like those of this 
present life, but purer in their nature, and more 
exalted in their aim." 

" Well," replied Curtis, " if I were asked to 
choose, I confess that I should be inclined to 
adopt the childish theory as the more rational 
of the two. At any rate, if you do not accept 
the angelic and aesthetic idea of heaven, you 
must admit that Scripture gives you no other. 
And, unless Christianity be altogether a delu- 
sion, it seems to me that the Bible representa- 
tion of future blessedness must be received as 
substantially true. It is the only theory which 
is in the least degree consistent with the other 
Christian beliefs. For heaven was purchased 
by the blood of Christ. His death must be 



a 'Civilized Heathenism. 113 

taken as the measure, not only of the sinner's 
guilt, and of his punishment in hell, but also of 
the just man's standard of holiness, and. of his 
reward hereafter. It could not have been 
worth while for Christ to die, that he might 
win for man grace enough to enable him to 
serve God and mammon decently in this life, 
and enjoy at the last a heaven in which it 
should be his highest happiness to serve God 
and mammon rather better than before; but 
it was worth while for Christ to die, if, by his 
death, he might procure for man the power of 
closely imitating his pure and spotless life, and 
might thus prepare him, day by day, for fellow- 
ship with himself at God's right hand. You 
tell us in your sermons that Christ is the 
corner-stone of Christian truth. Let me tell 
you, in return, that, unless Christ be the corner- 
stone also of Christian practice, the fabric of 
your Christianity will tumble down. Accept 
the fact that his example is literally the model 
of every Christian's life, and* all things con- 
cerning Christianity become, I do not say 
credible, but, at all events, intelligible, and con- 
10* 



114 Modem Christianity, 

sistent with themselves. Then the precepts of 
the gospel are no longer unpractical and ridicu- 
lous, but hold up a standard which is meant to 
be attained. Then heaven ceases to be the 
impossible abode of easy-going, good-natured, 
respectable members of modern English society, 
who could not by any means appreciate its 
joys ; and we begin to comprehend how inces- 
sant private prayer, and daily public worship, 
and works of self-denial and mercy, can form 
the only fitting preparation for a state of bless- 
edness, wherein the vision of God will be man's 
great reward, and Christ shall shine as the sun 
forever. Then, also, the mystery unravels it- 
self, how man, by any amount of wickedness, 
can deserve the fearful punishment of hell. If 
Christ has given him a model which he may fol- 
low if he will, and man deliberately rejects it, 
laughs at it, and thwarts and hinders those who 
strive to copy it, with his bitterest malignity and 
spite ; if Christ was put to death by every sin 
of man, and man persists in sinning still, that he 
may see Christ crucified afresh, and horribly 
feast his eyes upon the agony of his God, — then 



a Civilized Heathenism. 115 

it becomes intelligible to me that the awful 
penalty of an everlasting fire should alone suf- 
fice to expiate the guilt of the unrepentant 
sinner. But your modern theory of a Christian 
life and its reward hereafter is more than I can 
understand. You have thrust away your corner- 
stone ; and the fair fabric of Christianity has 
become a ruined heap of inconsistencies and 
absurdities. You discard the example of Christ, 
because to follow his example would make you 
ridiculous in the sight of men, — the very thing 
which he declares that his followers must always 
be. You thoroughly enjoy all our heathen com- 
forts and amusements; and when we taunt you 
with your dishonesty, and tell you that you are 
serving God and mammon, you have the un- 
blushing impudence to look us sanctimoniously 
in the face, and assure us that we are quite mis- 
taken in supposing that you really take delight 
in worldly pleasures ; that you only indulge in 
them because you think it a duty, and that your 
heart is all the while intently fixed on higher 
and purer joys. You confess that this life is but 
as a moment in comparison of eternity, and that 






n6 Modern Christianity \ 



at every instant of the day you are preparing 
yourselves either for heaven or hell : and yet 
you talk as heathen talk, and laugh as heathen 
laugh, and dine as heathen dine ; doing all 
these things, as I said before, not because the 
weakness of the flesh has suddenly betrayed 
you, but because you dare to pretend that God, 
the Father of the very Christ whom your sins 
have murdered, sent you into the world in 
order that you might live very much as other 
men. The plain fact is, my friend, that you 
have invented for yourselves a new Christ, and 
you want a new gospel, and a new heaven and 
hell, to correspond. And, what is more, you 
want a new set of prayers and psalms. I don't 
know whether familiarity has bred contempt, 
and taught you to look upon your litany and 
collects as an unmeaning form of words ; but I 
do know this, that your prayer-book, from 
beginning to end, breathes the spirit of such a 
true devotion, places the suppliant in a position 
so touchingly helpless before God, so abject in 
his dependence upon the grace he seeks through 
Christ, so deeply contrite for the sins wherewith 



a \ Civilized Heathenism. 117 

he has grieved the Holy Spirit, that I, a wicked 
unbeliever, can scarcely hear it read without 
being moved to tears. How can one who has 
said to himself, for example, the Collect for the 
Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, or for Easter Eve, 
or the General Thanksgiving, or the fifty -first or 
hundred and nineteenth psalm, — who has said 
these, and felt them, and dwelt upon them with 
any approach towards earnestness of mind, — 
how such a man can leave the church in perfect 
good-humor with himself, smiling and cheerful, 
and light of heart, and talk common worldly 
talk to common worldly people till it is time to 
go to service again, is more than a simple 
heathen can comprehend." 

" My dear fellow," I expostulated, " you set 
up such a ridiculously high standard! ,: 

" I set up a standard ? Indeed, I do no such 
thing. It is Christ, your professed example, 
who sets up the standard. It is the eternity of 
possible bliss in heaven that sets up the stand- 
ard. It is the risk of falling into an everlasting 
hell that sets up the standard. It is the prayer 
that you mutter with your own false lips that 



n8 Modern Christianity, 

sets up the standard. It is nothing to me. I 
don't want you to follow the example of Christ : 
you would be very stupid company for me if 
you did. I don't want you to live as if you 
were trying to win a place in heaven: there 
would be few points of sympathy between us if 
you did. I don't want you to talk and act as if 
you were thinking of your solemn litanies in 
church : we should see but little of each other 
if you did. All I say is, in the name of com- 
mon, decent honesty, be one thing or the other. 
Be a Christian, or be a heathen. Don't repeat 
petitions which simply have no sense, except in 
the mouth of one who is copying Christ in 
every word and deed ; and then turn out into 
the world, and lead a life a trifle better, or a 
trifle worse, than that of an intelligent Hindoo. 
If your prayer-book lessons of holiness are too 
strict for you, have the candor to confess it, and 
own that your psalms are out of date, and that 
your collects were written in days when men 
regarded Christ's example in a different light 
from the light which civilization and common- 
sense have since revealed to you. If a Chris- 



a Civilized Heathenism. 119 

tian can repeat his confessions and thanksgivings 
without actually sobbing aloud, it may, at any 
rate, be fairly expected that he cannot repeat 
them, and really feel them, without hurrying 
home after service, and pouring out his burst of 
penitence alone in his secret chamber before 
God. Do you think, old fellow, that your good 
people in a general way have the slightest 
notion what sort of a life it is to which the 
words of their own prayer-book pledge them ? 
nay, that they have ever taken the trouble to 
reflect what their litanies and kyries mean ? ' 

"I hope they have," replied I; " but you 
forget that a Christian is bidden to do other 
things besides weep and mourn. St. Paul says 
that we are to 4 rejoice evermore ; ' and the 
very psalms of which you speak are full of 
expressions which are designed to move the 
heart to gladness, and not to sorrow." 

"Yes," he returned; u and here is yet 
another instance of Scripture perverted and 
misapplied. The Bible says that the Christian 
is to rejoice ; but how ? His joy is to be, 
from first to last, a purely spiritual joy. I defy 



120 Modern Christianity^ 

you to produce a single text which counte- 
nances your taking delight in any earthly 
gratification whatever. Those who choose to 
have their pleasure now will lose it hereafter. 
It is, of course, quite easy to conceive, from a 
Christian point of view, that the man who is 
daily struggling against his sins, and following 
the steps of Christ, should be inwardly ten 
thousand times more happy than the worldly 
man. On his knees, in close communion with 
his Lord, the holy and pure of heart may be 
satisfied with a fulness of joy which the man 
of pleasure has never known. But apart from 
Christ, or from matters in which Christ is more 
or less directly concerned, it is quite impossible 
that he who is living a Christ-like life should be 
merry and glad. Even if he could feel happy 
on his own account, there is the wickedness of 
many whom he loves, which must needs distress 
him. Would you believe that my dearest 
friend upon earth was on trial for his life, 
and would very probably be hanged, if 
you met me somewhere at five-o'clock tea, 
talking nonsense to some young lady ? So 



a Civilized Heathenism. 121 

neither will I believe that you imagine yourself, 
or any one for whom you care, to stand in 
danger of everlasting torment, when I see that 
you are able to dismiss the subject from your 
thoughts, as if there were no particular cause 
for alarm. I cannot believe it. Unless you are 
prepared to maintain that the possibility of 
damnation forevermore is consistent with a 
careless, joyous laugh, in short, that the pros- 
pect of being burnt alive through countless 
ages is a cheerful prospect, rather than other- 
wise, you shall hold me excused if I pronounce 
my opinion, that, somewhere or other in the 
relation between faith and practice, there exists 
among you modern merry-making Christians 
a gigantic absurdity ; and what the absurdity 
is, any poor benighted heathen with a head on 
his shoulders must have the wit to see. You 
are trying to serve God and mammon : you are 
trying to make things spiritual accommodate 
themselves pleasantly and inoffensively to 
things material : you are trying to make Christ 
hide every characteristic feature of his face, so 

that he may walk harmless and undisturbed 
11 



122 Modern Christianity, 

among the haunts of men, winking at their 
worldliness, adapting his precepts to their com- 
mon-sense, and never presuming to hurt the 
feelings, or wound the self-love, of any living 
soul. This is what you are trying to do ; and, 
in making the attempt, you have involved your- 
selves in a maze of impossibilities. In support 
of a position illogical in itself, you are always 
most illogically arguing backwards." 

" What upon earth do you mean by arguing 
backwards ? " . 

%l I will tell you what I mean. You paint an 
ideal, a very perfect and happy ideal, of a 
gentleman or a lady ; you invest this ideal 
with all the qualities which go towards forming 
such characters in life as one delights to meet : 
and then, because you have been taught to look 
upon Christ as the highest type of manhood, 
you call your ideal gentleman a Christian. He 
is no more like Christ than he is like the stars. 
As a gentleman, he is forced to do, every day of 
his life, things which Christ never did ; and is 
forbidden almost to speak one word which 
Christ ever spoke. If, instead of arguing back- 



a Civilized Heathenism. 123 

wards, painting your ideal first, and then as- 
suming, that, because he is so good, he must be 
like Christ; if, instead of this, you would argue 
forwards, would consider what Christ said and 
did, and make your model Christian say and do 
the same, — you would very soon perceive tha^t 
the words " Christian " and u gentleman " are sim- 
ply contradictory. A gentleman is a man whom 
it is at any moment a pleasure to meet, because 
you may be sure that he will set you at your 
ease, and do or say something to make you 
happy. A Christian is a man whom it is at all 
times the greatest nuisance to meet, because 
you may be perfectly certain, if he be really in 
earnest, that he will do his best to make you as 
ill at ease as possible ; will remind you inces- 
santly of the flames of hell, and rebuke you to 
your face, regardless of good manners, for 
every thing you do or say which savors of this 
present world. The truth is, as I said before, 
that you have adopted for yourselves the best 
and purest form of civilization, and called it 
Christianity. It is not Christianity at all. Chris- 
tianity begins just where the best and purest 



124 Modern Christianity, 

form of civilization leaves off, and sets to work 
to oppose and thwart its progress at every turn. 
Civilization permits people to work hard all day 
that they may become wealthy, to enjoy thor- 
oughly their hours of recreation, and to sit 
down to a comfortable dinner in the evening. 
Christianity tells a man that he must give his 
money to the poor, no matter whether political 
economists approve or not; frightens him out 
of his wits, in the midst of his pleasures, by the 
threat of everlasting fire ; and bids him leave the 
dinner-table as soon as the bare wants of exist- 
ence are supplied, that he may spend the rest 
of the evening in prayer for the safety of his 
soul, rather than in the refreshment of his body. 
I am not saying that this is what men and 
women in modern society ought to do. Heaven 
forbid that any fellow-guests of mine should 
ever be so eccentric ! All I say is, that this is 
clearly what Christianity enjoins them to do, 
and that, if they stop short of this, they are civ- 
ilized heathens." 

u Do you soberly mean me to gather from 
your words, my dear Curtis, that a man cannot 



a Civilized Heathenism. 125 

be a Christian without making an ass of him- 
self?" 

"I do soberly mean you to gather just pre- 
cisely that very thing. I say emphatically that 
every true follower of Christ must needs make 
himself ridiculous in the eyes of worldly people, 
in the opinion of modern society, every time he 
speaks or acts." 

u But, my dear friend," I expostulated, "you 
really have no right to force upon a faith so 
venerable as ours a reductio ad absurdum." 

u That," answered he, u is no affair of mine. 
You must get out of any such difficulty as best 
you may. You parsons volunteer these extraor- 
dinary doctrines; and you should be prepared 
to accept the consequences that ensue. It is a 
perfect mockery to tell me that I must imitate 
a Christ, who, all his life, was covered with 
reproach and ridicule, and in the same breath 
to tell me that I am not required to expose 
myself to ridicule and reproach. It is sheer 
nonsense to threaten me with a hell which is to 
torture my undying body forevermore, and 

• then to explaiji that it is by no means intended 
11* 



126 Modern Christianity, 

that I should be terrified continually at the 
thought of it. This is part of your genuine 
modern- Christian plan of arguing backwards. 
You want me to lead a pleasant, gentlemanly 
life, and then to try and make myself believe 
that this was the life which Christ led ; when 
the Bible says it was not. You tell me, that, up 
to the last minute of my existence, I shall be in 
danger of the everlasting flames of hell; and, 
when I object that the bare possibility of such a 
fate leaves me no choice but to weep and groan 
from morning till night incessantly, you say 
that I am forcing upon your most holy faith a 
reductio ad absurdum, and that I am a wicked 
infidel for my pains. Whether there be a hell, 
or no, may be judged a matter of opinion ; but 
it can be no matter of opinion what sort of life 
those who stand in peril thereof must lead. All 
the doctors and fathers and schoolmen that 
ever lived cannot alter the inexorable law that 
pain is dreadful, and the pains of hell so un- 
utterably dreadful, that no man can believe in 
them, and smile. Your Christian doctrines are 
too tremendous ever to appear trivial. If they 



a Civilized Heathenism. 127 

are true at all, they are so awfully true as to 
leave us no room for any thought beside them. 
Do what you will, you cannot change eternal 
fire into any thing else but fire eternal. Theo- 
logically, no doubt, it would be highly conven- 
ient that there should be a hell and no hell, 
a heaven and no heaven, a Christ and no 
Christ. But it is only theologically that such 
fictions can stand : for practical purposes, we 
must have one thing or the other. If you will 
only believe it, my friend, there is no middle 
way between the Christianity of Christ, and 
downright infidelity. Heaven becomes utter 
nonsense, unless it was opened to all believers 
by the sharpness of Christ's death, and unless 
those alone shall win it, who, through ridicule 
and insult and shame, have visibly at every 
moment crucified themselves into fellowship 
with his sufferings. Hell becomes utter non- 
sense, unless it is the penalty of sins so horrible, 
that the Christian ought to spend half his life 
upon his knees, weeping for his own and his 
brother's guilt. Your prayer-book becomes 
utter nonsense, unless the Christian worshipper 



128 Modern Christianity, 

leaves the house of God with downcast face 
and tearful eyes, afraid to lose by lightsome 
gesture the . grace that he has received, and 
bravely resolving that men may scoff and sneer 
and persecute, but he will clothe his very life 
and conversation with the words that he has 
offered up in prayer. Your gospel becomes 
utter nonsense, unless it is the record of One 
who came to set his mark forever upon a 
handful of devoted followers, who in every 
generation should be known from all others by 
their likeness to their Lord, who should be 
hated of all men for his name's sake, who 
should literally and in every sense renounce 
this present world, and lay up for themselves a 
treasure in the world to come. These are the 
signs by which I should look to distinguish the 
Christianity of Christ. But I see no such signs 
in the modern English Christian; and therefore 
I remain a heathen. By this fourfold test I 
try you, — by your prayers, your preaching, 
your hopes, and your fears; and I find your 
lives wanting at every point. You follow the 
example of a Christ of whom the gospel does 



a Civilized Heathenism. 129 

not tell : you utter prayers which commit you 
to such a life as you do not pretend to lead : 
you talk of a heaven so little precious in your 
eyes, that, for the sake of winning it, you can- 
not give up the paltry joys of earth: you 
whisper solemnly about a hell whose terrors sit 
so easily upon your mind, that any trifling pursuit 
suffices to drive the thought of them far away. 
This is the personal witness on which a reason- 
able creature in search of truth is asked to 
believe in the astounding miracle of the incarna- 
tion and death of God. Pardon me, my friend, 
if I assure you that such testimony will convince 
no man whose assent is worth obtaining. To 
take one test only from among the four by 
which I am trying you, — it is enough to turn 
a believer into an infidel, to hear one of your 
average parsons discourse about the punishment 
of hell. He declares, for instance, that those 
who do not hate and speedily renounce every 
kind of sin will be cast into the lake of brim- 
stone. He declares, moreover, that although 
every one who hears him may, if he pleases, 
obtain grace enough to enable him to avoid this 



130 Modern Christianity \ 

terrible doom, it is, nevertheless, almost a cer- 
tainty that only a few, a very, very few, will 
seek that grace, and use it. Therefore it follows, 
as a logical consequence, that nine-tenths or 
three-fourths, or any fair proportion you please 
to take, of the average Sunday congregation, 
will suffer excruciating torture forever and for- 
everniore." 

"How dare you," I remonstrated, — u how 
dare you make such cold-blooded calculations ? 
I shudder to hear you use language so fearfully 
wicked. The Bible, you must know, expressly 
discourages any speculation as to the number of 
the lost or saved." 

"My dear fellow," answered Curtis, "I do 
not dare to make any calculations at all. I 
merely take the general estimate, as I find it 
laid down in the orthodox sermon. All preach- 
ers to whom I have ever listened agree in de- 
claring that only a small minority of mankind 
will probably be saved. A small minority 
means, I suppose, about one in ten ; but it shall 
mean nine in ten, if anybody likes that better. 
The question of a few more or a few less is 



d Civilized Heathenism. 131 

quite immaterial to my argument. If one man 
in a congregation, or one man in a parish, or 
one man in a diocese, is going to be burnt alive 
for millions upon millions of centuries, I do not 
quite see how the minister whom God has 
appointed to rescue his soul can ever sleep at 
night, or ever contemplate so horrible a destiny 
without floods of tears. On the average minis- 
ter, however, this responsibility seems to sit very 
lightly. He delivers his most awful message ; 
he tells his people plainly that if they sin they 
will be damned ; he knows for certain that they 
will go on sinning all the same ; and under a 
grave apprehension, not to say a strong impres- 
ion, that several of his cherished acquaintances 
and kindly neighbors will be devoured in flames 
unquenchable, he walks home to his vicarage, 
jokes with his wife, romps with his children, 
chaffs his friend, sits down comfortably to his 
luncheon, and thoroughly enjoys his slice of cold 
roast beef, and his glass of bitter beer. Will 
any man in his senses believe that he means 
what he has just been saying in his sermon ? Of 
course, he will believe nothing of the sort; and 



132 Modern Christianity, 

therefore it has come to pass that England is full 
of intelligent laymen who doubt and disbelieve. 
How, indeed,, should they accept such teaching ? 
The judge, when he sentences a criminal to a 
mere transient death, speaks with broken voice, 
and scarcely restrains his tears. The priest, 
the minister of God, can talk of the intolerable 
death eternal of souls committed to his charge, 
and talk of it with placid face, in neatly -rounded 
phrases, and calm, collected tones. Will any 
one believe him ? Ah, no ! He may win ap- 
plause for his eloquence, but he will not souls. 
His congregation will watch him home, and see 
how his own words tell upon his life ; and when 
they find that he can give up his Monday 
morning to worldly business, and his Tuesday 
afternoon to worldly pleasure, while the fire, 
according to his own account, is being already 
kindled, which may devour the choicest of his 
flock, they will take his Sunday's sermon for 
what it is worth, and nothing more. He may 
please to imagine that he believes in an ever- 
lasting hell ; but, when next he proclaims his 
belief, he can hardly be offended if the straight- 



a Civilized Heathenism. 133 

forward Briton should shake his head, and 
smile." 

u Then do you mean to say," I inquired, 
" that the parson has not a perfect right to his 
wife, and his luncheon, and his bitter beer ? " 

u He has every possible right," rejoined 
Curtis, " as far as I am concerned, to all the 
good things which his means may enable him 
to procure. But then, you see, I do not believe 
in his doctrine. No more does he. He cannot 
hold it, and care for a single earthly joy. As 
long as there remains but the suspicion of a 
chance, that, if he fails in bringing men to 
Christ, he will be burnt alive forever, so long, 
if he have ordinary human feelings, will every 
thought of his heart be given to the one work 
in hand. He may, at some moment of tempta- 
tion, forget the doom which threatens him ; 
or he may have altogether failed to realize 
what everlasting punishment actually means ; 
or he may dismiss the matter from his mind 
as an incomprehensible mystery, which he is 
bound to teach, but which he cannot seriously 
believe. But if he does believe it ; if he lite- 
12 



134 Modern Christianity \ 

rally, truly, honestly believes that for millions 
upon millions of ages, as long as God himself 
exists, God will torment in hell, with agonies 
intolerable, an overwhelming majority of the 
men and women and children now living 
merrily upon this earth, — if he can believe 
this, and all the while can eat and drink, and 
laugh and play, and go to his bed in peace, 
he must be without exception the most extraor- 
dinary person that the great Creator ever 
made." 

" Well," said I, after thinking for a while, 
" making allowance for your absurdly exagge- 
rated way of putting things, I am bound to 
acknowledge that your fourfold test of a true 
religion is theoretically sound. We ought, of 
course, to imitate Christ, to live as we pray, to 
cherish the thought of heaven, and to dread 
hell. One thing, however, which occurs to me 
is this, — that, if your standard of Christian holi- 
ness were generally adopted (I won't distress 
you by saying that 'the world could not go on,' 
but), the species could not be propagated. Art, 
science, literature, and every legitimate occu- 



a Civilized Heathenism. 135 

pation of man, would have to be sacrificed at 
once ; and the great human family itself would 
speedily disappear." 

"If it be so," replied my friend, " even then, 
unless you can show where my argument breaks 
down, I shall but have made it the more appar- 
ent that your religion is a superstition and an 
absurdity. But, supposing myself to be a 
Christian, I should strongly hesitate to admit 
your position, that the truest type of a Christ- 
like life need interfere with matrimony, or with 
art and science in their devotional application. 
The instinct which leads man to seek a wife 
must be just as divine in its appointment as 
that which teaches him to eat when he is 
hungry, or sleep when he is tired; and the 
chaste husband has positively nothing more in 
common with the man of unclean life than he 
who has partaken sparingly of the simplest food 
has with the drunkard who is being disgrace- 
fully carried home. Besides, I can readily con- 
ceive how the bringing-up of children in the 
fear of God, and the fashioning of a household 
after a strictly scriptural model, should beget a 



136 Modern Christianity, 

daily succession of duties eminently Christian. 

It is difficult, perhaps, to concede that matrimony 

is equally open to the priest, simply because 

« 

one does not understand how he can possibly 
find time for even the preliminary steps which 
such a state entails. Think, for example, what 
mischief the Devil might do in the parish, while 
the parson was making love to the squire's 
daughter. But for priest and layman alike 
there must be a variety of secular pursuits 
available, wherein the mind of each might find 
its needful refreshment, and whereby the glory 
of God might be directly and visibly promoted. 
In the first place, there is natural history. Con- 
sidering that the great and wise Creator, as 
you gentlemen profess to believe, has made in 
England alone something like ten thousand 
species of insects, and more than seventeen 
hundred wild flowers, — to say nothing of sea- 
weeds, snails, funguses, and creatures of divers 
kinds innumerable, — it is not much . to your 
credit that scarcely one so-called Christian in a 
thousand should know a moth from a butterfly, 
a beetle from a cockroach, or a hawkweed from 



a' Civilized Heathenism. 137 

a dandelion. Then there is architecture, music, 
painting, poetry, every one of which, as your 
churches and cathedrals testify, may be conse- 
crated to the service of God. The Primate of 
all England is said to have expressed an opinion, 
in his recent charge, that the musical portion 
of your cathedral services is ' overdone.' It 
has been very much the reverse of 'overdone,' 
in any case within my own observation. 
Among much that was extremely beautiful, I 
have generally chanced to hear your noble aisles 
and transepts desecrated with a composition 
which was about as worthy of performance in a 
Gothic choir as the daubings of some village 
sign-painter would be worthy of a place in the 
National Gallery ; and which was performed 
after a fashion such as any educated audience 
in a concert-room would have saluted with 
hisses and groans. In fact, a comparison of 
your cathedrals with the music celebrated 
therein provokes a somewhat instructive con- 
trast between the Christianity of your fore- 
fathers and the heathenism of yourselves. You 
have abandoned that extravagance of Christian 



138 Modern Christianity \ 

love which lavished decoration ungrudgingly 
on roof and arch and pillar, that God might 
have the best of every thing, whether any prac- 
tical end were served, or not; and you have 
adopted the calculating rule of genuine heathen 
economy, by which every occupation in which 
man is not earning either money or temporal 
enjoyment is very properly regarded as a simple 
waste of time, is reduced to the scantiest 
dimensions possible, and is rendered with the 
minimum of cost and the minimum of labor. 
Unless your glorious relics of ecclesiastical art 
are to testify to the pious superstition of your 
ancestors, but to nothing more, there surely 
must be scope, beneath the shadow of their 
walls, for the development of many a hallowed 
taste, the dedication of many a precious gift, 
and the employment of many a half-hour spared 
from the day's routine of bread- winning, and 
sacrificed to God. I am glad," continued 
Curtis, "that our subject has led us. to speak 
of cathedrals; because I can soberly declare 
that nothing which I see around me tends so 
constantly to confirm my view of the barefaced 



a Civilized Heathenism. 139 

heathenism of modern Christianity as the atti- 
tude which you nineteenth-century churchmen 
have assumed towards these monuments of 
ancient piety. You possess an inheritance of 
noble structures, which, on your present prin- 
ciples, it would be considered a wanton misuse 
of capital to build ; and you perform therein a 
service meagre, miserable, and mean, every 
accent of which gives the palpable lie to your 
claim of fellowship with the Christian architect 
of old. You will never persuade us infidels that 
you believe in God, until every Christian among 
you, moved by decent gratitude for benefits 
received, kneels twice every day in his cathe- 
dral or his parish church, and there, with voice, 
with alms, or with whatever talent God has 
bestowed upon him, bears his part in offering 
the most faultlessly beautiful act of worship 
which Christian art can devise." 

"My dear fellow," said I, "people nowa- 
days have something else to do. We are practi- 
cal men ; and we simply have not time to go 
to church every day, and offer up such a service 
as you propose." 



140 Modern Christianity ^ 






" Was Christ a practical man ? " asked Curtis 
in return ; u or was he one who outraged e very- 
worldly maxim, and set common-sense at defi- 
ance every time he spoke? Ah, my friend! 
how is it that you will not have the honesty to 
confess that Christ has grown old-fashioned in 
your eyes, and that you have become a heathen 
for the purpose of enjoying more comfortably 
this present life, retaining in the background a 
mere sentiment of Christ, to help you to look 
forward with complacency to the life eternal? 
It is your dishonesty, and not your dogmatizing, 
which has lost for you your influence over the 
hearts of men. You might teach a hundred 
Athanasian Creeds, with a hundred damnatory 
clauses added on to each, if only you lived and 
moved as men who believed such dogmas to be 
true. But you must not cling fast to Christ 
when you want to claim unity with him in 
doctrine, and break away from him, as if he 
were out of date, when you want to be merry 
like other men. They tell me that your bishops 
are likely soon to meet in conference, for the 
purpose of deciding what concessions shall be 



a Civilized Heathenism. 141 

made to the public as regards the Athanasian 
Creed. They may save themselves the trouble. 
The public don't want any concessions in any 
matter so totally beside the point at issue. 
When your creeds have been mangled and 
mutilated till no ancient council would recog- 
nize them, your psalms and collects will still 
remain, to set the layman wondering what upon 
earth you mean ; and every sentence of your 
gospel will ring out its mocking comment on the 
average priest's or bishop's life, as a damnatory 
clause. What all men everywhere demand, and 
what you parsons obstinately refuse to grant, is 
a plain answer to the very plainest question that 
mortal lips have ever framed. We want to 
know whether the Christianity of the New 
Testament is false or true ; whether Christ was 
a great philosopher, who taught men noble 
principles of action, and showed them how to 
be happier and healthier in this present world ; 
or whether he is the very and eternal God, who 
took upon him human flesh that we might know 
for certain how human creatures ought to live ; 
who died on the cross to win for us the power 



142 Modern Christianity^ 

to imitate his brave contempt for earthly digni- 
ties and joys ; who watches us at this moment 
from his throne in heaven, to see whether we 
cling to him, as his disciples clung, through 
insult and suffering and shame, or deny him by 
following the fashions of a world which con- 
demned its Lord to die. Tell us, in simple, 
straightforward words, which of these things 
Christianity is (it cannot be both of them), 
which of these things Christ is (he cannot be 
both of them) ; and we shall know what sort of 
value to set upon your threats of everlasting 
fire. But it is too soon to talk to us of being 
burnt alive for a whole eternity, when you have 
not yet succeeded in convincing us, by any 
special solemnity in your life, or any tokens of 
holy dread, as you move in and out among us, 
that you yourselves are altogether satisfied of 
the reality of Christ's life and death, of the 
necessity of copying his example, of the un- 
speakable blessedness of heaven, or the aven- 
ging flames of hell. You see, old fellow, there 
is, unfortunately, so very much about your 
religion which looks shuffling and unreal ! Your 



a Civilized Heathenism. 143 

miracles won't 'come off,' except on condition 
that no very scientific witnesses are standing by. 
Your God is said to be a spirit, because such a 
description affords a convenient way of account- 
ing for the somewhat suspicious circumstance 
that no mortal creature has ever seen him. 
Your heaven is a place for which only one sort 
of life can possibly be a preparation; and this 
life you do not lead. Your hell is the scene of 
tortures so terrific that no human being can 
contemplate them without turning pale ; and 
you don't seem one bit afraid to run the risk of 
being sent there. Now, all these things bear 
the manifest stamp of unreality ; and unreality 
is repulsive to the mind of every honest man. 
When you talk to the clear-headed Briton of 
such a religion as this, you can only expect, 
as Mr. Leslie Stephen says so happily, with ref- 
erence to another subject, somewhere in L The 
Alpine Journal,' — you can only expect that 
your intelligent listener will c put the tongue of 
incredulity into the cheek of derision.' Well 
may you say that infidelity is making rapid 
strides. Its strides will become more rapid 



144 Modern Christianity, 

still. As civilization advances, so does Chris- 
tianity appear more and more absurd. Fifty 
years hence,- your grandsons will laugh at your 
simplicity, just as you laugh now at the worship- 
pers of the great goddess Diana. Your par- 
sons will have turned their hands to some more 
honest trade ; and your churches will begin to 
serve a more practical purpose, as museums of 
science and art. Reasonable beings will have 
grown ashamed of an idle and foolish supersti- 
tion, which bribes men with the promise of 
impossible delights, and frightens them with the 
threat of impossible horrors, just as the silly 
nursemaid frightens your child with stories 
about Bogy coming round the corner to gobble 
him up." 

"I am sadly afraid," said I, trying to look 
severe, u that I shall have to give you up, as a 
hardened infidel." 

u Indeed you will," was the reply, "unless 
you are prepared to favor me with proofs which 
are decently substantial. Let me see Christians 
imitating Christ, — imitating not a Christ whom 
I* could fashion for myself out of materials 



a Civilized Heathenism. 145 

purely heathen, not a Christ whom society ac- 
cepts already as the pattern philosopher, the 
embodiment of common-sense, the ideal man, 
but a Christ who at every point is making him- 
self an intolerable offence to the un- Christlike, 
a thorn and a scourge to every man who does 
not lie stretched at the foot of his cross, weeping 
over the sins which nailed him there, loving 
him with a love which all the world can see, 
and fearing only lest he should sharpen the 
agony of his Saviour's death by one unkind or 
unholy word. Show me a Christian who is imi- 
tating visibly such a Christ as this, and I will 
show you a heathen (heathen not out of stub- 
born choice, but heathen because there is no 
evidence before him yet to make him any thing 
better), — I will show you a heathen who will 
confess that this marvellous tale of Christ and 
heaven has become credible to him at last, now 
that the marvellous witness he has looked for is 
forthcoming; for then it will be possible for 
me logically to understand how God has left off 
working miracles, not because the newspaper 
reporter is looking on, and will publish the 

13 



146 Modern Christianity, 

proceedings in to-morrow's c Times,' but be- 
cause he has made the life and conversation of 
his chosen ones an ever-present miracle in the. 
sight of men, — because he has given his priests 
the superhuman courage to defy public opinion, 
to endure hatred, ridicule, and scorn, to oppose, 
obstruct, and harass every creed and custom of* 
society, with the very same uncompromising 
faithfulness wherewith their Master opposed it, 
when he provoked and exasperated the Jews, 
till they murdered him out of very spite and 
fury. I know for certain how Christ would be 
treated if he were here. I can see the press 
deriding him, the fine lady picking her way 
past him in the street, the poor flocking round 
him as a friend, the magistrate committing him 
to prison. Let me see his witnesses treated 
thus, and I will believe that he has sent them. 
Their Christ-like life in the face of cold modern 
refinement, in the teeth of cruel common-sense, 
shall be to me a miracle no less stupendous than 
the feeding of five thousand in the wilderness, 
or the raising of Lazarus from the dead. But 
while I see them claiming the right to live as 



a Civilized Heathenism. 147 

other men, glorying in the fact that they have 
no peculiarities, smiling politely on sin, and 
caressed by those who would have spat upon 
their Lord, — so long as I see them thus, they 
shall teach me, if they please, the principles of 
Christ's philosophy ; but they shall not dare to 
tell me that they are priests of a crucified 
Christ." 

"Well," said I, "I think I can produce a 
man whose life pretty well fulfils the conditions 
you lay down ; but then, poor fellow, he is as 
mad as a hatter." 

u What is his name? and what special signs 
of insanity does he display?" 

"He is a parson of the name of Ainslie. He 
came into a lot of money some years ago, with 
which he built a magnificent church in a 
wretchedly poor district cut off from my parish. 
He still has a very large income ; but he lives 
on about two pounds a week, and gives all the 
rest away. He scarcely eats or drinks or sleeps, 
and does not very often speak, unless you say 
something to c fetch 7 him ; and then, by Jove ! 
he does speak, and to some purpose too. When 



148 Modern Christianity, 

he first came here, he went a good deal into 
society ; but he used to say such very strange 
things at dinner, that people were constantly 
getting up, and leaving the room. He never 
dines out now ; and there is not a gentleman in 
the town who would not punch his head if he 
met him at his hall-door. The poor people like 
him tremendously : he is as gentle as a lamb 
with them * but the sight of a decently dressed 
man or woman in a carriage seems to drive 
him perfectly insane. Poor fellow ! I am very 
sorry for him. He is awfully nice in so many 
ways! and, if he would only hold his tongue, 

he would be the most popular man in . 

Such a generous fellow too ! It was only yes- 
terday that I found out something accidentally 
about him, which I don't think anybody else 
knows. Some Dissenting minister, who is editor 
of a low radical newspaper in the town, wrote 
a lot of scurrilous articles, not long ago, accus- 
ing Ainslie of crimes and follies which neither 
he nor anybody else ever dreamed of commit- 
ting. Of course, Ainslie took no notice of the 
thing whatever; in fact, he never knew, until 



a Civilized Heathenism. 149 

quite lately, that any tiling of tlie sort had been 
written ; and the editor, encouraged by his 
forbearance, and thirsting for popularity among 
the roughs, proceeded further to attack the 
private character of Lord Hungerford, our 
great conservative peer. Lord Hungerford 
communicated with his lawyer, and the lawyer 
communicated with the editor ; and the end of 
it was, that the gentleman of the press was con- 
demned in costs to an enormous amount, and 
must inevitably have been locked up in jail, 
had not an anonymous donation been put into 
his solicitor's hands, which covered all his lia- 
bilities, and set him straight again. The rever- 
end editor flatters himself, to this day, that the 
gift was bestowed by some admiring friend in 
his congregation ; but I happen to know, and I 
mean some day to inform my radical parishioner, 
that Ainslie himself was the giver." 

"I tell you what," cried Curtis, starting up, 
" I should like to know that fellow. Could you 
take me to him ? " 

u H'm," said I, looking at my watch; u one 
could hardly go and knock a man up at a 

13* 



150 Modern Christianity, 

quarter past eleven. And yet I don't know. 
Ten to one we shall find him in his chancel, 
where he spends pretty nearly half the day and, 
night, praying. We will go now, if you like. 
There is a lovely moon ; and the church is not 
above half a mile from here." 

The half-mile being accomplished, we found 
the chancel-door unlocked, and the beautiful 
choir and richly- clothed altar lit up with more 
than daylight splendor by the tranquil glory of 
the moon. I recollect its occurring to me, as 
I closed the door, that this was the way in 
which I would put it, if ever I wanted to 
describe a midnight visit to a church. Against 
the south wall knelt Ainslie, his hands at one 
time clasped together, at another time clutching 
at the pillars of the sedilia, and his body 
moving restlessly about, as if in pain. He was 
evidently lost in the fervor of his prayer ; and 
we made so little noise, that he did not hear us 
enter. His words were murmured rather than 
spoken ; and his voice and gestures had clearly 
escaped beyond control. For a few seconds he 
would kneel in perfect stillness, till the sorrow 



a Civilized Heathenism, 



I5i 



which he seemed to have been nursing the 
while burst out in a passionate sob, and the 
man appeared to be struggling with himself for 
some tremendous mastery, or crushing to utter 
extinction some unwelcome thought that haunted 
him. At such a time his cry for help rang 
piteously through the silent night, as he half 
sighed, half shouted, the long, wailing whisper 
of his trouble ; and at such a time it was that 
Curtis and myself, unwilling to stop and listen, 
but more unwilling to retreat, gathered up, and 
stored in our memories for many and many a 
day, the fragments of his prayer. 

I will not venture to transcribe it: indeed, 
the words were far too sacred to be written 
here. But the point which struck me so 
forcibly, in Ainslie's language no less than in 
his tone, was this : the way in which the man 
had somehow got himself into the visible 
presence of Christ, till he made you feel that he 
was literally following his Master about through 
every incident of the past day, and bringing all 
his actions, one by one, before his great Example, 
to see how far and whereabouts he had failed. 



152 Modern Christianity \ 

It became evident to me, in spite of any thing 
which my natural sense declared to the con- 
trary, that the Christ to whom he prayed was 
at this moment every whit as close to him as 
he had ever been to St. Peter or St. John. He 
laid hold of him, he appealed to him, he 
caught at his hand for help, he looked up 
wistfully for his smile, he shrank away like a 
frightened child from his tenderest reproach. 
Christ was there, — nobody could doubt it, — ■ 
there, in that very chancel, holding communion 
with that prostrate form. Christ was there : 
and, as for me, I knew that I was outside the 
circle wherein he could be seen and felt ; that I 
was one of those who thronged and pressed, but 
could not get nigh to touch ; nay, I told myself, 
in sober earnest, that I was a very scribe or a 
Pharisee, looking superciliously on. How many 
a long day and night must this poor fellow have 
spent upon his knees, before he could have 
learned how to bring Christ as near as this! 
How must his whole life have become one un- 
ceasing prayer! How must his very breath, as it 
came and went, have been drinking down deep 



a Civilized Heathenism. 153 

draughts of grace, and sighing up to Heaven 
for more ! I could not help wondering whether 
many of our bishops or deans or canons or 
influential country rectors, the apostles of the 
modern English Church, were thus engaged at 
this particular time, or were likely to be found 
similarly occupied at any time whatsoever ; 
and my mind unconsciously ran back to glimpses 
of comfortable libraries and snug arm-chairs, for 
which the portly figure of the occupant had 
almost been measured with tape and line. I 
thought of the pleasant hours that one might 
spend in such a room, " administering " a diocese, 
or "organizing" parochial work, while the 
curate or the Sister of Mercy went pottering 
about the lanes. I pictured to myself the hour 
of luncheon, and the well-dressed wife and 
daughters, and the substantial meal ; and I 
fancied that I saw the master of the house look 
rather cross because the kidneys were not 
devilled half enough, and because the minced 
veal, which the cook knew perfectly well was 
the only other dish that he could touch in the 
middle of the day, had been pretty nearly poi- 






154 Modern Christianity^ 



soned with too much lemon. Then I heard the 
plans for the afternoon discussed, — which of the 
party would ride, and which would drive, and 
what were the visits that ought to be paid ; 
while some of the younger ladies ventured to 
speculate about the dinner-party in the evening, 
whether it would go off well. This carried me 
down to seven or eight o'clock, when the host 
would courteously entertain his friends, and his 
friends would drink his wine, and praise it, 
discoursing about it eagerly, affectionately, as 
if it were a subject dear to their inmost soul. ' 
And thus I travelled back into the drawing- 
room, where all was blaze and brilliancy, and 
women smiled and sparkled, each one holding 
her court as a radiant queen, to whom men 
paid pretty little acts of homage, and simpered 
pretty little unmeaning words. All this came 
rapidly before me ; and I could not but contrast 
a day and night so spent with the days and 
nights of my poor mad friend kneeling in the 
moonlight ; and I wondered what Christ would 
have thought of it all, and whether he would 
have been most at home with Ainslie, in his 



a Civilized Heathenism. 



155 



isolation from the world, or with my hospitable 
dignitary, whose liberal table was so good for 
trade, and whose genial habits did so much to 
cement a happy union between the clergy and 
the laity. The contrast forced itself upon me ; 
but I would not permit myself to draw an 
inference which I felt to be unkind. The social 
life of the average dignitary could not, I felt 
sure, be altogether a mistake. In so many 
ways, by private acts of friendship and in public 
ministrations, such men had won my cordial 
affection and esteem ; and it was quite im- 
possible to contemplate them as indulging one 
single gratification which Christ would not ap- 
prove. Ainslie must, unquestionably, be wrong ; 
and I gladly took refuge in my old belief that 
the poor fellow was morbid or melancholy mad. 

These thoughts were still chasing one another 
through my mind, and I had scarcely formed 
my last conclusion, when Curtis also began to 
demonstrate very perceptible signs of being 
moved as deeply as myself by Ainslie's exceed- 
ing earnestness. 

" Look here, old fellow," he whispered, in a 



156 Modern Christianity^ 

broken voice ; " I positively cannot stand any- 
more of that, you know. Let us come away 
home." 

Ainslie, however, was by this time aroused ; 
and we two had hardly escaped through the 
chancel-door, when he joined us in the church- 
yard. Having explained and apologized for our 
intrusion, I introduced him to Curtis ; and we 
then learned that he was waiting up to visit, for 
the third time that day, a parishioner of noto- 
riously evil life, who had been struck down 
suddenly with scarlet-fever, and was expected 
to die. 

"The doctor has sent me away twice," said 
Ainslie; "but he promised that I should go 
again somewhere about this time, if every thing 
went on well ; and he is going to send a boy to 
fetch me." 

" Have you had the scarlet-fever yourself, 
may I ask ? " said Curtis. 

u Never," was the reply. 

" Then I almost wonder that you are not 
afraid to go." 

u My life, sir," answered Ainslie, "is not 



a Civilized Heathenism. 157 

mine, that I should give it, or spare it, as may 
please me best. It is little enough that I have 
ever done for Christ; and, if I can serve him 
better in my death than in my life, I can wish 
nothing happier for myself than that I may 
die." 

At this moment the youth whom Ainslie was 
expecting appeared upon the scene, and carried 
him off to the sick man's chamber. He wished 
us both a cordial good-night, and started off on 
his mission with the air of a man who had a 
great work to do, and meant to do it. 

" There is a reality about that fellow," ob- 
served Curtis, as we were walking home, " which 
upsets me altogether. I never saw any thing 
like it before." 

u Yes," answered I: " his character has so 
many good points, that one cannot help feeling 
for him. It's a thousand pities that he is so 
frightfully mad." 

u Ah!" said Curtis: " they said something like 
that about Christ, didn't they ? — and about St. 
Paul, and all the rest of them. Mad ? Yes, he 
certainly must be mad. Mad means different 



158 Modern Christianity^ 

from everybody else ; and, if Christ were now 
on earth, he would be so totally different from 
you modern English Christians, that you would, 
most infallibly put him into an asylum." 

During the next few days my friend and I 
abandoned ourselves entirely to autumn manoeu- 
vres, and became too deeply engrossed in the 
tactics of Northern and Southern armies to^talk 
much about civilization and Christianity. When 
the March Past was over, and we south-country 
rustics had seen such a sight on our Wiltshire 
downs as we shall never see again, I drove 
Curtis back to my quiet little parsonage-house, 
and busied myself with a sermon on the 
evidences, wherewith I hoped to convert him 
from the error of his ways, on the ensuing 
Sunday. 

I had just concluded an argument so unan- 
swerable that it must needs convince, I felt sure, 
the very stubbornest heathen, when an ancient 
matron, who kept house for my friend Ainslie, 
was shown into the room. Her master, she 
said, had been "took" with the fever. He 
icould go, though warned of the consequences, 



a Civilized Heathenism. 159 

so he would. It must always be a comfort to 
her that she had done her duty by him, so it 
must. But gentlemen were so hard to manage, 
that she did not know how ever they could 
expect to keep their health, no more she didn't. 
From all which I gathered that I really was 
wanted at my poor friend's house ; and, indeed, 
on my arrival at his bedside, I found that I was 
not a minute too early. Curtis, rather to my 
surprise, was already there ; and, from certain 
indications in his face and manner, I could not 
doubt that some specially earnest conversation 
had passed between the two. 

U I have been telling him," said Ainslie, in a 
faint and gasping voice, laying his hand on Cur- 
tis's arm, "I have been telling him how right 
he is. It is Christ, Christ only, Christ en- 
tirely, Christ as he lived and as he died ; not 
Christ as we modern cowards have dressed him 
up, so that he may look like other men. It is 
Christ, or else it is nothing. We are literally 
copying his life, or else we are civilized, gentle- 
manly heathens. For Christian truth has all 
the elements of a profound absurdity, excepting 



160 Modern Christianity, 

just this one only element, that it is real. Take 
away its reality, and it becomes ridiculous and 
impossible. Our mysteries are fables, unless we 
mean them : our God is a myth, unless we show 
him visibly to men. We cannot hold our own 
against the clever sceptic, because we have let 
go Christ ; and Christianity without Christ is, of 
all philosophies, the most unphilosophical. Ri- 
diculous, indeed, to the mind of the natural man 
our faith must always be, and must have been 
intended to be, for it belongs to another world 
than the world in which he moves ; but, unless 
we live out our profession in downright earnest, 
we make it ridiculous also to him who would 
fain believe. Our theory of a Creator is ridicu- 
lous, our history is ridiculous, our miracles are 
ridiculous, our heaven and hell are the most 
ridiculous of all. In this only are we better 
than ridiculous, — that, at the very least, we are 
not ashamed to abide by our own absurdities ; 
that we are brave enough not to flinch from the 
logical issues of our creed ; that we have, at 
any rate, sufficient sense to see, that, if our 
choice is to lie between things temporal and 



a Civilized Heathenism. 161 

things eternal, no charter of Christian privilege 
yet conveyed to us can, by any possibility, give 
us the right to choose them both together. 
Times are not changed: it is a device of the 
Evil One to teach men so. Christ is as he was : 
his disciples are as they were. He can no more 
walk about our streets without insult and cruel 
mockings now than he could walk scathless 
about Jerusalem in days of old. As men 
treated him in the year 33, so do they treat him 
in 1872, and so will they treat him also in thirty- 
three times 1872. He is Christ; and good- 
natured, worldly men and women hate him. Let 
the Christian priest take this as the gauge of his 
faithfulness, — that good-natured, worldly men 
and women hate Mm too. Oh, if they should 
love him, and flatter him, and welcome him at 
their godless feasts, and make him free of their 
heathen pleasures, how will he face that day, 
when his Lord shall search him through and 
through, and look for the marks of scourge and 
rod, but look in vain ; and feel for the long 
furrows that the ploughers should have ploughed 
upon his back, but find no furrows there ? . . . 



1 62 Modern Christianity, 

Thou who hast borne with me so tenderly all 
these years, and now wilt take to thyself the life 
wherein I have given thee back so little of thy 
love ! accept, as my last poor offering of grati- 
tude, the thanks I render thee for this great and 
exceeding mercy; that, as I have followed — 
ah, so imperfectly ! — thy blessed steps, thou 
hast ever walked before me, not as a new 
Christ, grown dainty and refined, to suit the 
civilization of the age, but as the selfsame 
Christ of whom the gospel tells me, — poor, and 
Dersecuted, and laughed to scorn." 

Three weeks have passed since the foregoing 
pages were written ; and my friend Curtis has 
returned to London, to resume his practice at 
the bar. We stood together at dear Ainslie's 
grave, till the last notes of the resurrection 
service had died away, and the choristers had 
come up by turns to cast in their parting gift 
of flowers, and take a long farewell of one 
whose like they will never see again. Poor 
boys ! it was as much as they could do to keep 
their voices steady, as they sang the anthems 



a Civilized Heathenism. 163 

and psalms ; and more than once I feared that 
they would utterly break down. But I think 
even their unaffected childish sorrow touched 
me less than' the strong flood of tears which 
kept on bursting again and again from sturdy 
men and women who stood and wept on every 
side. Not only was the churchyard crammed 
to overflowing, but the street itself would 
scarcely hold the crowd of mourners. They 
who had misrepresented him, calumniated him, 
ground their teeth at him for the pure example 
that he shed, now stood apart, and brushed off 
the great drops that started from their eyes, 
lest their weakness and their self-upbraiding 
should be seen. Ah ! " We fools accounted his 
life madness, and his end to be without honor. 
How is he numbered among the children of 
God ! and his lot is among the saints." 

Three weeks have passed ; and I have just 
come back from a visit to the grave, over which 
I have got into the habit of liking to offer up a 
daily prayer that my death may be as full of 
hope as his, and my life — well, I have got into 
the habit, I am afraid, of not liking to think 



164 Modern Christianity^ 

much about my life, since the day when I 
stood with Curtis in the chancel-doorway, and 
listened to our dear friend's prayer. When . I 
had left a poor handful of late autumn-flowers 
upon the mound, I looked in at the open door 
by which we had entered on that memorable 
night, and started with surprise to see a figure 
kneeling just where Ainslie had knelt, weeping 
just as he had wept, and swinging itself to and 
fro with deep and passionate emotion. There 
could be no question who it was. A travelling- 
bag and a coat and umbrella lay close by on 
the pavement ; and I guessed at once that 
Curtis had suddenly formed the idea of paying 
me a second visit, that he had just walked from 
the station, and was recalling his memories of 
Ainslie by the way. I did not choose to dis- 
turb him at that particular moment : so I crept 
out of sight and hearing, and left him kneeling 
still. 

Whether my friend was simply moved by the 
very true sorrow with which he mourned dear 
Ainslie's loss, or whether in that pure life and 
saintly death he has discovered the witness 



a Civilized Heathenism. 165 

which he sought, and has become a Christian, 
I shall probably -learn from his own lips this 
evening. Of this much, however, I feel well 
assured, — that whatever step such a man may 
ultimately take will be taken in thorough 
earnestness of purpose ; and that, if he should 
indeed resolve to offer himself to Christ, he 
will love him with all his heart and soul. 

For myself, I walked slowly and sadly home, 
feeling more and more dissatisfied with my own 
position, and becoming at every moment more 
and more persuaded that this modern Chris- 
tianity of ours is neither better nor worse than 
heathenism, civilized and refined; that our 
God is to most of us the same mere abstract 
divinity, the same imaginary personification of 
good, as the gods of classical mythology to 
the Roman or the Greek; that it is not one 
whit more possible to serve two masters now, 
than when the great truth first was spoken, 
eighteen centuries ago ; and that there is 
absolutely no middle course left open, to any 
reasonable man, between the literal, untiring 
imitation of Christ, in life and death, and the 



1 66 Modern Christianity, 

downright refusal to believe that he either lived 
or died. 

Supernatural beliefs, I went on to think, do 
undoubtedly demand supernatural lives ; and, if 
it is not worth our while to live the one, it is 
utterly foolish to profess the other. At any rate, 
we have no right to brand the average worldly- 
minded man as an unbeliever, and threaten him 
from the pulpit with intolerable agonies in hell, 
when we meet him every day on equal terms, and 
eat his dinner, and drink his wine, and should 
think it very bad taste to rebuke his worldliness 
to his face, and very chicken-hearted to burst 
into tears at the thought of his dreadful doom. 
We have no right to appropriate a host of Pagan 
virtues, as if they belonged exclusively to our- 
selves; as if u heathen" were synonymous with 
" cannibal," and no one but a Christian could 
possibly be generous, or considerate, or kind. 
All these years we have been preaching the 
gospel of unreality to the world; and the 
world seems as far from conversion as ever. 
Is it not rational to suppose that our efforts to 
make people good and happy might be more 



a Civilized Heathenism. 167 

successful, if we lived visibly before society as 
men to whom this earth is absolutely nothing, 
and the day of judgment is the only matter 
worth a moment's thought ; or else admitted 
honestly that our standard has hitherto been 
too high, that we have exaggerated our knowl- 
edge of the hereafter, that Christ is but the 
idol of a popular superstition, and that it is 
enough for men to live soberly and peaceably 
in this present world ? 



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